


At Long Last Home

by SylvanWitch



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Afterlife, Angst, Fix-It of Sorts, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Supernatural Elements, fairytale, infidelity of a sort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-08
Updated: 2018-11-08
Packaged: 2019-08-20 11:14:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 39,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16554731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: It takes Thor two decades to finally find his brother in the backwater afterlife to which Loki's been condemned.  He's expecting a sullen, angry brother who spits accusations like venom and demands that he be freed.  What he finds is a gentle, patient gardener who greets him as a stranger.Twenty years.  Two cows, a litter of pigs, one interfering cat, and a wicked witch's curse:  A Grim(m) Fix-It.





	At Long Last Home

**Author's Note:**

> When a perfectly respectable time-travel lesbian romance is derailed by a fairytale fix-it for a pairing she's never written before, what's a woman to do?
> 
> Write it, obviously.
> 
> This is dedicated to my fellow writers of the WED challenge on DW. Thanks for listening to me obsess over this story for a month. I hope it's worthy of your support and encouragement.
> 
> All mistakes are my own.
> 
> Content note: For the purpose of this story, I'm assuming that whatever happens to reverse the effects of The Snap does not have the same effect on Loki's demise, which is independent of and predates it.

The sunny green meadow was spangled with purple asters and white daisies and limned in the silver lilt of a river to the east and a smudged line of dark green trees to the west.

 

Near the valley’s center, a splash of white: a cottage, thatched roof gold in the light of the setting sun, daubed walls whitewashed.

 

Behind a neat stone fence, speckled pigs snorkeled through a trough, and somewhere out of sight a cat loudly indicated its expectation of supper.

 

Chickens chuckled in a neat white coop.  In the field beyond and behind the house to the south a three-sided building sheltered two brown cows, liquid eyes in their dished, delicate faces warm on Thor as he approached.

 

On the far side of the house, hidden from his first view, there was a kitchen garden, neat rows divided by vegetable markers and perennial herbs bounded by perfect grassy lanes to mark them out.  There, a figure in a plain brown robe was bent over the new growth on a low, bushy green plant, humming offkey what might have been an ancient Asgardian battle hymn.

 

For a moment, Thor stopped breathing and thought that he might never start again, for the figure had straightened and half-turned toward the northern end of the valley, where his brother stood struck to stone by the sight of Loki, lost to him for so long and now returned, miraculous and whole.

 

One did not question when blessings fell like blue dusk across the valley.

 

Loki was in Thor’s arms before his brother could take a breath to speak.

 

When that breath was finally drawn, his lips said, “Who are you?”

 

And the first chill of night drew a cold line down Thor’s back.

 

He pulled only far enough away to hold the familiar face between trembling hands, looking deep into Loki’s eyes.  “Brother, I have come for you at last.  I have found you after all this time.”

 

Loki stepped away, frowning.  “I have no brother.  I do not know you.”  He hesitated, then, confusion replaced by a sympathetic understanding that Thor was quite sure he’d never seen on his brother’s features before.

 

“Are you lost?  It happens sometimes.  No doubt you intended to rest your head in Ooslot?  It’s just beyond the next mountain, but this time of year, the road is often washed away by spring floods, and it’s easy to lose the way.”

 

His words were tiny barbs setting their hooks beneath the skin of Thor’s face.  A muscle in his cheek twitched restlessly, the old wound twinging.

 

“Loki,” he asked roughly, “Don’t you know me?  I’m your brother, Thor.”

 

“My name is Lorne,” Loki answered, moving a few steps away from Thor, toward the cottage.  “Won’t you come in and sit down?  I’ll make us some tea, and we can have bread and fresh honey.  I’ve only just collected some from the hives.”

 

The man who looked like his brother gestured toward the far corner of the garden, where pale pink and pastel green and butter-yellow boxes were stacked.  There was a steady humming, as if the garden had an engine to make things grow.

 

Thor followed him helplessly, still not wholly convinced that Loki wasn’t just pretending not to know him, exacting his revenge for having been trapped here so long.

 

Years.

 

There had been much to do after Thanos was defeated, not the least of which was finding a home for the last remnants of their people.  Thor had never stopped looking for Loki, never ceased in his relentless pursuit of the truth about where his brother had gone, sure that if he was not in the underworld—and the Witch told him Loki was not there—that he must be trapped in some other realm, waiting for Thor to find him and bring him home.

 

“I tried to find you,” he began to say, but the words were dry in his throat, and they had come to the inside of the cottage, which was as neat and well-tended as the outside.

 

There was one large room, with a table and a sink with a pump and some cupboards for the kitchen, a braided rug on the floor between the kitchen fire and a rocking chair and smaller table, a book, an oil lamp.  In the far corner there was a bed, topped by a quilt in browns and greens, gold flecks like the ones in Loki’s own eyes scattered through the pattern. 

 

A trunk sat at the foot of the bed, closed.

 

Along the whole length of the back wall was a workbench, a single round stool before it and over it shelves of bottles and jars, neatly labeled in a hand Thor did not recognize, and books, well-thumbed, bird feathers and dried leaves sprouting from their closed pages for bookmarks.  From the open rafters, herbs hung in bundles.  On a trivet beside the stove, near the banked fire, something fragrant steamed and hissed.

 

“Please, sit,” Loki said, gesturing to one of two plain chairs drawn up to the kitchen table.

 

He moved without haste, with easy confidence, to the fire to worry it to life, to the sink to fill the kettle, to a cupboard to remove two greenware cups, a platter with bread, a squat pot with a tiny spoon poking from its top.  He put these things on the table and retrieved a bottle of molten gold from the counter beside the sink.  He did not sit when the easy bustling was done but leaned against the sink’s edge and smiled at Thor.

 

“From where do you hail, if I may ask?” Loki inquired, a polite look on his sharp face.  
  
  


“New Asgard, brother.  We’ve found a second home.  The people miss you and want you home with us.”  It was not precisely a lie.  There were some among the survivors who were aware of what Loki had sacrificed so that his brother might live.  They, anyway, would like to offer him their gratitude in person.

 

“Is that by the Great Sea?”  His brow furrowed in mild confusion, and it was that look of honest bewilderment that at last fastened the cold fist around Thor’s heart and squeezed.  For a long span of moments, he could not breathe, and when he at last sucked in a painful gust, it wheezed in his throat, and he choked on it, coughing in great gales as thunder rumbled overhead, filling the night with ominous warning.

 

Loki served him a tea that released a grassy, clean fragrance, calming Thor’s cough and easing the pain in his chest.

 

He kept his eyes on his hands, letting the heat of the mug seep into his fingers, which he had to watch lest they tighten around the cup and shatter it.

 

He wanted to break things.  All this way he had come, all the years he’d searched, the blazing joy of seeing that beloved figure bent in the garden—all of the promise of the moment squeezed into this:  A stranger’s concerned eyes on him, solicitous and a little wary.

 

“You are welcome to spend the night,” the man who called himself Lorne said.  “The bed is clean and soft.  I can sleep in the byre with the cows; it should be warm there, and their breath is sweet.”

 

The idea of Loki, Prince of Asgard, sleeping among the cattle would once have sparked in Thor a terrific mirth.  Now it only made him weary with loss and fear. 

 

“I’ll take the byre,” Thor insisted, rising from his cup and moving toward the door. 

 

“I wouldn’t dream of letting a guest sleep rough,” he argued, but Thor was already at the door, his hand so tight on the latch that the metal cut into the skin of his palm.  Without looking back at his brother, he said, “I’ll be fine.”

 

He took the storm to the shore of the sea and let it break over the waters, whipping them to a frothy rage as the tears drew fire down his cheeks and he bellowed out his anger.

 

When he had calmed, he returned to the meadow.  It was late.  The sky above was milky with stars.  In the byre, the cows had bedded down, sweet-breathed and unafraid of this trembling creature who crawled in among them to sleep.  His rest was fitful, disturbed by dreams he could not remember but which woke him with gasps and panting.

 

A cock crow awakened him to diffuse yellow light and the smell of heavy dew on sweetgrass.  His brother was surrounded by the gossip of hens as he crooned to them and collected their eggs. 

 

Thor had never seen him so gentle.  
  
  


The green eyes that captured his gaze with warmth and welcome were both his brother’s and a stranger’s.  Their beauty was achingly familiar, but the expression there was not.

 

“I’ll milk the cows,” he offered, watching the long-fingered, quick hands dart into the straw and pull free an egg, barely disturbing the hen that had laid it.

 

Loki smiled and said, “Thank you,” nodding toward a wooden pail that sat on the wall of the kitchen garden.

 

The cows stood patiently for it, the hiss of the milk strangely soothing, the warmth of the morning sun breaking across his bent shoulders loosening a tension he hadn’t noticed he was carrying. 

 

He tried to hold onto that peace as he walked back to the cottage, gave his brother the pail, offered to slice and toast bread as his brother cracked eggs into a sizzling skillet.

 

They ate in almost perfect silence, broken only by the morning birds twittering in the eaves and the occasional grunt of a pig eating its breakfast at the trough.

 

When they were almost done, a grey shadow slipped into the kitchen, and Thor physically startled before realizing it was a tabby cat that had taken up residence on his brother’s lap.  In what was obviously a well-established ritual, Loki broke off a bit of egg and fed it to the lithe beast, who began purring loud enough to put Thor’s distant thunder to shame.

 

“This is Jotun,” Loki explained, eyes crinkled in a fond smile.  What he met in Thor’s own gaze was lost in the sudden cold anger pulling a haze across Thor’s vision. 

 

“Brother,” he said sternly, pushing away from the table so quickly that the chair tipped over, striking the floor with a sharp crack, like lightning splitting a tree in the mountains.  “Enough!”

 

The sudden motion and noise had frightened the cat, who leapt to the high ground of the sink counter and raised its back, hissing.

 

For his part, Loki sat looking stricken, as though Thor had actually slapped him, his brow furrowed in deep concern, his mouth working over words he didn’t seem able to speak.

 

“Stop this at once. You’ve had your fun, but I tire of it.  I will not be your fool!”

 

Still in his seat, Loki had frozen, hands up in a placating gesture, eyes wide with fear.  “I am sorry to have upset you,” he said softly, as though any utterance was likely to startle more violence out of Thor.  “But I do not know what you wish me to say.  I am not this brother you speak of.  I am sorry you have lost him, but I cannot be him for you.  Please sit once more, let me get you some tea.  You can tell me about him, and it may be that I can help in some small way to return him to you.”

 

The earnestness on his brother’s face was unmistakable.  Loki had been a consummate liar, but the softer emotions had been alien to him, and he was never quite genuine when he feigned the more human feelings like regret and compassion for others.

 

Thor felt coldness sink into his belly, and he clenched his teeth against an urge to scream.  A shadow fell over the room, and rain began to patter down outside.  With a deep breath, he gathered his control.  The rain stopped, clouds washing back as though swept away by the housekeeping sun, and once again they were two men sitting at a plain table with the remains of breakfast between them.

 

“I’m sorry,” he said after another moment, voice rough with unspoken words.  “I didn’t mean to shout.  It’s just that you remind me of my brother, Loki, and I have been trying to find him for so long.  When I saw you, I’d hoped…”

 

He couldn’t give voice to the long waking nights when he’d imagined what Loki must be suffering, the grey days of loneliness and anguish when he’d catch himself turning to seek the mischief always alight in his brother’s eyes, only to remember that light snapping out.

 

Some of his sorrow must have bled into his expression, though, for Loki made an aborted gesture, as though to offer a comforting touch, and then said, quietly, hesitantly, as though he feared Thor’s reaction, “What is your brother like?”

 

So Thor told him, building the image memory by memory—the laughing eyes, lips that could say more with a sneer than the rich voice ever could; the clever hands always drawing magic from the air; the arguments, the adventures, the long years of growing up, the separations and reunions that marked their coming into manhood. 

 

As he spoke, his brother sat across from him listening as though to a stranger telling a story, and when Thor got to the hardest part, when he spoke of Loki’s sacrifice, of that terrible moment when he realized what his brother was going to give up for him, he could feel his throat closing, like an iron collar around his neck, and the man across from him did reach out then and lay a warm, strong hand over his own, not squeezing or holding, just touching, as if to let Thor know that he was not alone, that he could share his grief with this other who wore his brother’s face.

 

They must have sat like that for an hour in the warming morning light, the cat curled up on the rug behind him, the chickens clucking busily in the dooryard, sweet air wafting in from the garden, bathing them in its calming, easeful breath.

 

When at last Thor came back to himself, sucking in a sharp, hard breath, as though waking from an uneasy dream, Lorne took back his gentle touch and stood to clear the table.

 

Thor helped, neither of them speaking but working seamlessly, as if they had always lived like this together, and when the work was done inside, Thor joined him in the garden, toiling quietly there, too, until the sun was high overhead and a distinctive sound drew them both up from their weeding to see a horse and rider growing larger as they approached the cottage.  
  
  


“Neighbors from the village come for tisanes, poultices, and other medicines,” Lorne explained, straightening with a wince from his bent-backed posture.  He ran a loving hand over the ferny leaves of a plant that Thor could not identify, but the heady scent it gave off eased a little the omnipresent tightness in his chest.

 

The rider turned out to be a woman with a long, brown braid spilling down her back, split skirts in soft leather, and skin the color of chestnuts.

 

“Lorne!” she boomed, dismounting athletically and springing forward to take his offered hand in a firm grip.  She didn’t seem fazed to find Thor there, looking him up and down with frank appraisal and then grinning.  “Who’s this?” she asked.  Matching his height, she could look Thor in the eye, and her broad shoulders and trim, strong figure reminded him with a pang of the Valkyries.  So many of them gone, never to come again.

 

“This is Thor, a visitor from near the Great Sea.  Thor,” he added, turning toward him, “This is Djenna, from Ooslot, to the east.”  His eyes flickered toward the forest and back to Thor, waiting, perhaps, to see what his mad visitor might do with this intruder on their peace.

  
Thor couldn’t blame Lorne for his wariness.  He thrust out a hand and shook Djenna’s, not at all surprised at her strong grip.  Her eyes were golden, startling against the darker brown of her skin, and he found himself wondering what her people were like and how they lived. 

 

“I’ve come for my da’s monthly cure,” she explained, and Lorne’s quick, “Of course,” suggested this was an arrangement of long standing between them.  “I lost track of the days,” he explained apologetically, and as Djenna waved it off, Thor said, “It’s my fault.  I distracted him from his work, showing up as I did unlooked for.”

 

“I’ll only be a few minutes.  Will you come in for tea and to rest awhile?”

 

Djenna shook her head. “No, thank you, I’ll not get in your way.  Besides, I want to see how that litter of yours has come along.”  She gave Thor a speculative look, and he hastened to say, “I’ll go with you,” leaving Lorne free to hurry into the cottage for her father’s medicine.

 

At the sty, they watched the sow and her speckled piglets line up at the rail, expecting a treat.  Djenna chuckled, a deep, full-chested sound.  “I haven’t anything for you, little ones.  Go on!  Shoo!”

 

She turned a warm smile on Thor, who couldn’t help but smile in response.

 

“So, how long have you known Lorne?” she asked, anticipating the very question he’d been about to put to her.

 

“Ah,” he hesitated, wondering how to answer.  “We’ve only just met,” he decided at last, telling himself it wasn’t really a lie, since Lorne was a stranger to him, even if he did wear his brother’s face and form.  “I took a wrong turn on my way to Ooslot,” he said, adopting the explanation Lorne had offered the night before, “and saw his cottage in the valley.”  
  
  


“The road is bad this time of year,” Djenna sympathized.  “If you’re a stranger to it, it can be treacherous.”

 

“And how long have you known Lorne?” he asked at last, feeling excitement tightening around his heart, unsure of what he hoped she’d say but sure that it would be illuminating.

 

“Since he came to the valley, more than twenty years ago now, not that you can tell by looking at him.  He hasn’t changed a bit.”

 

A shadow crossed over her lively face, and Thor sensed that she was suddenly uncomfortable or uncertain.  About him?  Or about Lorne?  He wondered at the way her expression shifted, her eyes no longer meeting his.

 

Twenty years, she’d said.  That meant Loki had been in this valley since Thanos had crushed the life out of him. 

 

“How did Lorne come to be here?”

 

Thor realized his mistake as her eyes shuttered and she shook her head, a slight frown deepening the grooves around her mouth.  “Surely that’s his story to tell,” she chided, and he felt both irritated at her reticence and chastened by her rectitude.

 

He ducked his head.  “Yes, you’re right.  I did not mean to pry.”

 

She waved a hand, face once again clear.  “No matter.  I’m sure he’ll tell you himself if you ask.  Are you staying long or heading onward?  I can ride with you as far as the crossroads and point you in the right direction, if you’d like to leave with me today.”

 

The very idea of walking away from his brother made Thor cold.  His lips felt rigid in their polite smile as he said, “No, thank you.  I think I’d like to stay here a time.  It’s peaceful.”

 

He realized as he made the excuse that he meant it.  The valley was peaceful and lovely, something restful in the wide-open vista that gave ample warning of oncoming danger.  He’d spent so much of the last twenty years in a constant struggle to keep his people together and safe, to help them rebuild their world on strange shores.  It would be a blessing to rest his head a while without the heaviness of the invisible crown he wore everywhere else.  Here he could just be Thor.

 

“Lorne will like your company,” Djenna observed, and there was a slyness at the corners of her mouth and a playful gleam in her eyes that said something to Thor he could not just then parse.  He nodded noncommittally and turned his attention back to the pigs, who were rooting around now in a pile of straw in the far corner of the sty.

 

“He’s a miracle worker with his herbs and potions,” Djenna said a few moments later.  “Without him, I think my father would no longer be with us.  Some in the village call him a witch and say that his work will curse those who trust in it, but I have not observed that to be true.  Still…”  Her shrug was eloquent.

 

Thor heard the warning she was offering, letting him know what he might face should he stay, the superstition and suspicion of strangers.  Lorne’s strangeness adding to Thor’s.  He saw also her sadness at this state; obviously, she liked and admired the man.

 

“He could do worse than a champion like you,” Thor answered her, and she ducked her head, a little, pleased smile on her lips.

 

They visited the chickens and then the cows, in each place spending a stretch of minutes in companionable silence, and ended up on the garden wall, listening to the drone of the bees as they tumbled the flowered heads of herbs and flowers Thor could not name.

 

At last, Lorne emerged with a stoppered clay jar in his hands and a weary smile on his face.  “I’m sorry it wasn’t ready for you when you arrived,” he apologized again, and Djenna pulled him into a spontaneous hug and said, “Nonsense!  The delay gave me time to get to know your friend here a little.”

 

If Lorne were surprised to hear Thor promoted in his status, he didn’t indicate it.  Instead, he smiled warmly at each of them in turn.

 

“Thank you,” Djenna said, stowing the jar in a pocket of her skirt.  Out of a different pocket, she took a handful of coins that glinted and jingled as she dropped them into Lorne’s hand.  He shook his head, “No, no, this is too much—I can’t—,” but she’d already untied her horse and mounted, turning its head back the way they’d come.

 

“You have refused payment these last three months, Lorne the Healer, and my father would never forgive me if I didn’t make us even.”

 

There was a note of caution in her words, a kind of formality, and Thor realized he was missing something, a feeling affirmed by Lorne’s reaction to her words.  Sorrow crossed his face and his shoulders slumped, head dropping to hide his expression.

 

“I am sorry, my friend,” Djenna murmured, looking stricken.  “I must go.”

 

Without another word she turned her horse and urged it into a smooth jog.  Thor watched his brother, who was still staring at the ground.  There was a faint tremor in his shoulders and arms, and Thor feared he was experiencing some sort of fit.

 

Just as Thor was about to reach out to him, Lorne took in a gasping breath and looked up.  His cheeks were dry, his eyes dull, unfocused, but he turned toward the cottage, holding the hand clenched around the payment as if it burned his skin to touch them.

 

Just inside the door to the right, a small box was mounted at eye level.  It had a slit at the top, into which Lorne dropped the coins, which fell with hardly a sound, indicating that the box must be quite full.

 

“What was that all about?” he asked his brother’s retreating back.  He got no answer except a tightening across Lorne’s shoulders, and Thor understood that he would hear no more about it.

 

Dinner was a quiet affair.  Lorne seemed withdrawn, distant, and Thor did not know how to bridge the gap.  He ate little, and Lorne nothing at all, scraping his full plate into the slop bucket for the pigs.

 

“I’ll wash up,” Thor offered, but Lorne shook his head. 

 

“I can do it.”

 

“Please, let me help,” Thor pleaded, meaning far more than just the household chores.

 

Lorne looked up at him then, giving him his eyes for the first time since Djenna’s strange parting.  “There is nothing you can do for me,” he said, and there was in his face a resignation so profound that Thor wanted to cry out against it, to shake his brother until Loki’s dark fire came back into his eyes, driving away this weak and wounded man who cowered in the face of mere words.

 

The Liesmith would never have been mastered like that.

 

As the sun withdrew its blessings from the valley, darkness drawing over it, Thor made to take his leave of the cottage, intending to travel to the Djenna’s village and discover what he could of the people there.  But Lorne said, “Please, stay the night here.  I’ll sleep in the byre tonight.”

 

“I’ll be fine.  I like the night air,” he demurred, but Lorne insisted, and something frantic in his eyes forced Thor’s capitulation.

 

“Very well,” he said at last, trying to be gracious, though he chafed at the thought of another night spent doing nothing to help recover his brother’s memories.

 

Lorne seemed relieved that Thor would be staying, and Thor wondered what it was that Lorne was so afraid of in the peaceful darkness of his lonely valley. 

 

Thinking to slip out after Lorne had fallen asleep, Thor sat up by the dying fire, listening to the embers settle and remembering the many nights he and Loki had spent turning a fire to cold ashes with stories and songs.  As children, they’d often camped out in fair weather or spent nights alone at a little cabin their father had built just for them at the far end of the garden, out of earshot of nosy servants and prying eyes.

 

Sighing, Thor rubbed a hand over his face, looked longingly at Lorne’s neat bed, and shook away his fatigue.  
  
  


The front door opened on silent hinges, and he stepped into the dooryard, listening for any sign that Lorne might still be awake.

 

The sky was deep with stars, the damp grass alight with silver dew, and from somewhere in the trees to the east, an owl tolled some small creature’s doom.

 

Nothing stirred any nearer, and Thor moved to the gate, which was also well-maintained, not betraying him as he opened it and then closed it firmly behind him.  He was turning toward the road that led to Ooslot when a mewling noise alerted him to Jotun’s lurking presence.

 

He turned to see two luminous green eyes staring at him out of the deep shadow at the base of the garden wall.

 

“What is it?” he murmured, feeling foolish at first for addressing a cat.  But the cat seemed to understand him, for he rose and stretched and then padded a few feet, stopped, peered at Thor over his shoulder, and mewled again.

 

Feeling ever more that he had strayed into some fey dream, Thor nonetheless followed the creature as it led him toward the byre where his brother slept.

 

Except that Lorne was not asleep, or at least he did not sleep peacefully.  A sound alerted Thor to his distress, so that seeing his face twisted in anguish did not startle him as much as it might.  He wondered if he should wake him or if that would do more harm than good.

 

Just then, Jotun let out a spine-tingling howl, and Lorne sat bolt upright in the straw.

 

He looked about him wildly, obviously confused, so Thor strode forward and said, “Easy, man.  It was only a dream.”

 

“You!” Lorne hissed.  “Come to taunt me once again, _brother_?”  He spat the epithet as though it were a curse, and even as the words registered, Thor realized he was speaking not to the gentle man who’d stolen his brother’s countenance but to that brother himself, Loki, Prince of Asgard and God of Mischief.

 

Loki rose from his rustic bed as though from a royal couch and stalked toward Thor with a predatory grace.

 

His lips were already moving in what would doubtless prove a devastating curse.

 

Thor stepped back, hands up, placating.  “Now, Loki, I have come to take you home.  I have spent these many years looking for you, and I want only to help you.”

 

Still Loki came on, features shaped by burning malice.  His hands motioned as though he could summon something dire from the very air, as he was wont to do.

 

Nothing happened.  
  
  


Frustration turned his lips into an ugly grimace, and Thor understood then that even now, returned to his senses as he obviously was, Loki was still powerless.

 

“Please, Brother.  I want to help.  Let me help.”

 

“What can you do?  You’re nothing but a wandering spirit come to taunt me.  I’ll not let you punish me yet another night, brother.”  Again, the word fell wicked from his sneering lips.

 

“Loki, please,” Thor said, not above begging.  The wonder of discovering that his brother still lived inside the other who wore his form during the day had been tempered by a growing horror at what exactly had been done to his brother.

 

Thor stood his ground, hands raised as Loki came on.  He was prepared for whatever violence his brother might visit upon him, and, in fact, Loki struck, swift as a snake. When the blow connected, the sound seemed to carry a great distance across the still, clear air of midnight.

 

It hurt, but the pain clarified things for Thor, who merely dropped his hands, exposing himself for further abuse.  If that is what it would take for Loki to eventually listen, then Thor would allow it.

 

But Loki had fallen still, mouth open, eyes wide with astonishment.  He stared from his reddened palm to Thor’s stinging cheek as if he could not trust the evidence of his senses.

 

“You’re—,” he whispered, word breaking as though his throat were closing.  “You’re real.”

 

“Aye, brother,” Thor affirmed, stepping close enough that he could see a fine trembling begin in Loki’s throat.

 

Suddenly, his arms were full of his brother, and his own throat was closing over the painful joy of it, and he couldn’t speak for long, long moments.

 

In his embrace, Loki shook, and an almost animal sound was wrenched out of him, muffled against Thor’s shoulder as something inside him at last gave way.

 

Then he was throwing himself backward, out of Thor’s arms, and once again striking him in a fury of blows, shouting obscenities and accusations, breaking himself against Thor as Thor struggled to contain his brother’s rage without hurting him.

 

It was so much like their teen years together that Thor felt tears welling in his eyes.  Trust them to find this, at least, of familiarity after so long a time apart.

 

At last, Loki’s anger spent itself, and he slumped, panting and disheveled, against the byre wall.

 

“Why have you come now?” Loki asked, voice wrecked with spent adrenaline and shouting.  He didn’t look up at Thor, and Thor felt a fist closing around his heart.

 

“I looked for you as soon as I could, brother.  But there was no sign of you.  I scoured the underworld to no avail, bribed witches and demi-gods, even tried to bribe Huginn and Muinnin to search for you.  I couldn’t find you.”  Thor’s own voice was rough with unshed tears, tears that gathered hot in his eyes.

 

“But I never stopped looking, I swear it to you, brother.  And now I’ve found you, and you can come home with me to New Asgard, and we can be a family again.”

 

That brought Loki’s eyes up.  If he could have flayed Thor alive with a look, he would have, his expression said.

 

“Do you think it as easy as that to leave?  Do you think if I could take my leave I wouldn’t have already done so?  Or did you just assume that I was waiting like a weeping damsel for my thundering brother to save me from my fate?” 

 

Thor couldn’t delve to the bottom of Loki’s expression; layers of weariness, bitterness, and a deep and abiding grief were polished by a thin veneer of sneering wit.

 

“What do you mean?” Thor asked, though the swooping feeling in his belly anticipated Loki’s answer.

 

“I mean,” Loki enunciated, teeth bared in a way that made him look like a cornered wolf, “I am trapped here. This is my Hel, punishment for my every misdeed.  For one hour a night, I am alive to every indignity of my station,” he tugged at Lorne’s plain robe with a sneer of supreme disgust.  “And then I fall asleep, only to wake again the next night to suffer once again the crushing weight of the truth:  This is my life now.  An hour of agonizing awareness for every twenty-three of total ignorance.”

 

It took Thor an embarrassing length of time to realize what his brother was saying, but when he understood, it staggered him, literally, so that as he attempted to regain his balance, lightning played between his splayed hands and turned his vision to white fire.

 

“You,” he began at a ragged whisper.  He cleared his throat and tried again.  “You do not know yourself for the rest of the time?”

 

“No, thank gods for the minor mercies,” Loki’s sour expression belied any gratitude the words might have suggested.

 

“And Lorne does not know of you?”

 

“Is that his name?” He sounded only vaguely interested.

 

“Do you mean to say that no one has ever come to visit you when you’ve been…yourself?  Or that in all this time you’ve never gone to the village to keep vigil over a patient?”

 

Loki’s head was already shaking before Thor finished his questions.  
  
  


“I am anathema to the people of the village.  They believe I am cursed, and they will not travel here if it means staying after dark.  Think you, brother, that my jailers would be so foolish as to leave me any true hope of freedom?  I am myself for a single hour each night.  I have no power beyond that of an ordinary mortal.  When I try to leave this valley, I find myself awakening once again in that hovel the other calls a home.  _I_ am alive for only that scant hour so that I can suffer a greater agony of torment.”

 

“But your final sacrifice,” Thor began, trailing off as rage fired incandescent in his brother’s saturnine face.

 

“Ah, yes, let’s talk about that, shall we, brother?”  He spat the word, as if he would cut Thor from his blood if only he could.

 

Thor held up his hands once more, capitulatory, straining.  “Your death was not in vain.  We defeated Thanos and saved our people because you gave yourself so that I might live.”

 

“You still think so much of yourself after all this time, Thor?”  Loki’s eyes were glassy, manic, despair chasing hate across his face.

 

Thor swallowed around the bile that rose in his throat with the memory of his brother’s lifeless eyes and twisted neck.

 

“I do not,” he answered, truthfully.  Something of that truth must have bled through his words, for Loki’s expression yielded—a little—to something less murderous. 

 

Now was not the time to pour out his failures, though he sorely wanted to confess to the only one left who was capable of offering him forgiveness.  The recriminations from his own people for the loss of Asgard.  The civil strife with the settling of the new world.  The fight to wrest order from the chaos of a hard land.  The famine in their third year.  The plague in their sixth.

 

What had once offered them comfort, the signature of their ascendency, seemed now only tinsel and shine, a hollow crown perched on an empty head.

 

There were many days when Thor had struggled to leave his bed.

 

None of this compared to Loki’s awful—and some, Thor among them, would argue, undeserved—fate.

 

Though come to it, he’d spent two decades in a sunny glade drowsy with bees, tending his livestock and his plants, murmuring snatches of his lost history to himself, unwise to his true nature except for a single hour of torment in the darkest hour of the night.

 

Added up together, had Loki spent more hours in sorrow than Thor?

 

But it wasn’t a contest.  And Thor was here now, come to bring his brother home.  He had no intention of allowing Loki’s loathing to stop him from doing what was right.  He’d just have to figure out how the curse on his brother worked and find a way to reverse it.

 

A way to return him to where he belonged, at his side, ruling with him, answering the people’s grimness with the mischief that once lurked in his bright eyes, a light Thor would restore if it were the last thing he did.

 

Mindful of the old saying about being careful what one wishes for, Thor turned his mind from these observations to the more mundane facts, tracing the progress of the dominant star in this world’s sky, realizing with a sinking sensation that Loki didn’t have much longer.

 

Risking more violence, he gripped Loki by the shoulders and captured his gaze with a direct look of his own.

 

“Brother, I will free you from this curse.  Together, we will return to our people.  You have my word and oath.”

 

Loki rolled his eyes, a gesture so infuriatingly familiar that it made Thor have to blink his own eyes to clear them. 

 

But Loki said, “Alright, alright.  Let me go, will you?  The other one will find it strange to have you manhandling him when he returns to his senses.”

 

“Do you accept my oath?”  It didn’t matter whether or not Loki accepted, and they both knew it., which inspired another eyeroll, epic in both scope and degree of disdain.  It gave Thor more hope than perhaps was wise.

 

“This time tomorrow night, then?” Thor asked.

 

“Do I have a choice?”  Loki’s impatient look made it clear that the question was rhetorical in nature.

 

“Goodnight, brother,” Thor answered, taking another chance and yanking his brother into a rough hug, which his brother accepted with the grace of a cat being forced into a bathtub.

 

Before Loki had taken three steps toward the byre, a change broke over him, rounding his shoulders, changing somehow the shape and energy of him so that it was clearly Lorne who turned his quizzical gaze to Thor and said, “Are you well?  Is something wrong?”

 

“I am fine, Lorne,” Thor said, though he felt as though he might not take a full breath until Loki once more returned to him.  “I thought I heard a noise.”

 

A look of such profound sadness marred Lorne’s face that Thor almost murmured a protest aloud.  Then Lorne shook his head, shrugging resignation over him like a blanket, and said, “I bid you goodnight,” in a voice both formal and weary.  
  
  


Thor thought his own soul was reflected in that voice, and he wondered what it must be like to be Lorne, awoken perhaps every night by the return of his soul to a stranger’s body.

 

That thought chased him into the cottage and Lorne’s bed, where he slept but fitfully, fearful of what he’d see in the depths of slumber and grateful enough for the crowing rooster that signaled an excuse for him to rise.

 

Despite the vivid memory of his brother’s transformation only hours before, Thor still found treacherous hope throttling speech when Lorne first came through the cottage door.  His brother was smiling, a certain glint in his green eyes, and Thor felt his heart leap so mightily that he’d swear his ribs had cracked.

 

“The hens have been particularly good to us this morning,” Lorne said, producing a basket to show Thor the brown treasures that explained his good humor.   
  


  
From somewhere in the desert of his heart, Thor worked up a smile, damning the hope that had made him forget that this was not his brother at all.

 

He couldn’t possibly spend another day doing chores around Lorne’s cottage, so after he’d cleared the breakfast dishes, he said, “I’m going to visit Ooslot today, but I’ll be back by dark.”

 

“Oh, in that case, could I trouble you to pick up a few things and make a delivery?  Usually, I send an order into town once a month with a messenger, but, well…”  By his awkward expression, Thor came to realize that Lorne was running low on certain supplies thanks to Thor’s own presence.

 

“I’ll take care of everything.  Just give me a list and the packages you’d like delivered.”

 

And that’s how the God of Thunder came to be wandering the muddy main street of a modest market village peering at rudely carved runes over lintels and trying to understand their address system.

 

Eventually, the villagers’ appetite for gossip overcame their innate distrust of strangers, and someone asked if he needed help.  When the speaker, a middle-aged man of medium build with a shock of red hair and a decided limp, discovered he came from Lorne, the atmosphere reset to an even cooler temperature, but he was given the instructions he needed.

 

The people’s reaction told him most of what he’d wanted to know about their attitude toward Lorne.  He’d hoped to perhaps see Djenna, but when he asked after her, people’s eyes slid away from his face, and he was left feeling as though he’d said something shameful.

 

It made no sense from his point of view, but then, little did on this hell world, for that’s what he was beginning to suspect it was.

 

On the surface, it looked like a pastoral idyll, but underneath was all the prejudice, rancor, and provincialism he’d encountered on Midgard.  
  
  


Where they at least had the Avengers and people like his fondly remembered Jane to balance the scales, this place seemed to be an endless source of small-minded, insular ugliness.

 

Or maybe he was just having a bad morning.  The third time a roil of black cloud covered the village like an inverted cauldron, Thor realized he wasn’t in a fit state for company, and he took himself away, past manicured fields, spreading orchards, and spindly vines just coming into green and stalked to the cold, shadowed verge of the sprawling wilderness that threatened Ooslot’s veneer of civilization on every side.

 

The trees here had the weight of age on them.  Grey branches like broken bones made a graveyard of the forest floor.  Deep in the canopy, something screeched.  Further away, another answered.  He was being discussed.

 

There was strange magic here, but he resisted the urge to call Stormbreaker to his hand.  The malice curled into the twisted roots and choking vines was older than Thor, deeper than the bones of the earth beneath the fetid loam.  Nothing was directed at him; he was inconsequential.

 

He wondered if the power of this place lived here, in the wild places.  He wondered if he could carry his brother far away, might that not break the curse and free him?  It couldn’t hurt to try, and it wasn’t as though Loki had any choice.  He could sulk through his hour, but it wouldn’t change his condition, and though his brother could often be cruel, he was rarely foolish.

 

He’d come around to Thor’s way of thinking.  
  


  
“No, absolutely not,” Loki said later that night, only moments after he’d returned to himself.  He was still dusting straw off of his robe with a moue of disgust, and he had barely looked at Thor at all.

 

“Brother, please.”

 

“Begging still, Thunderer?  It will do you no more good now than it did me _then_.”

 

Thor clenched his teeth and refused to rise to the bait.

 

He’d spent a quiet evening with Lorne, who’d offered him tea and silent company.  It had been restful, and he’d found that he was eased of some small portion of tension by the man’s abiding peacefulness.  That sort of calmness reminded him of Heimdall, whom he suddenly missed with a ferocity almost as painful as in those first days after the anger had worn off, when Thor had counted his dead and wished he could lay down among them.

 

One of those beloved dead was standing before him, obstinate-jawed and wolf-eyed, his intention to be impossible clear in every line of his face.

 

“I see no harm in trying.”

 

“That’s because hope is invisible,” Loki cried, the sharpness of his shout echoing through the clear night, coming back to them as if from the bottom of the world as a hollow mockery of speech.

 

Icy understanding stole his breath, but when he recovered it, he said, “I am sorry, brother,” and braced one hand against Loki’s shoulder.

 

Predictably, Loki shrugged out of the touch and turned away, but when Thor persisted, coming up behind him to put a hand on his shoulder once more, Loki let out a sharp sound, as if Thor had touched a wound, and then sagged, dropping his head.

 

“I am what you see before you, brother,” he spoke to the ground.  “I am nothing but a cipher that unlocks no secret.  The other is real; I’m a shadow.  You should leave this place before it drives you mad.”

 

 _As it has me_ hung unspoken between them, chilling the air to knives in Thor’s throat.

 

“Will you not try for me, then?  Will you not show me that I am wrong so that I, too, may cease hoping?”

 

Loki turned to give him a dark look from the corner of his eye, but he gave the barest of nods nonetheless, and Thor was saying, “Hang on,” and pulling his brother close by the waist, summoning Stormbreaker with his free hand and trying not to feel the excitement thrilling through him that they were again a team, at least for the duration of this experiment.

 

The world blurred.  Exhilaration burst over his skin like ice crystals.  Joy began to bubble in his chest.  And then they were struck with force, as if a massive hand had reached out to swat them like flies, and they hit the earth with teeth-rattling violence, the breath knocked out of them both.

 

Thor pried his eyes open as air rushed painfully back into his lungs and saw that they were exactly where they had been a moment before, except that they were both the worse for having landed in cow dung.

 

Loki was flat on the ground, panting harshly.  His hair was strewn with straw, his face smudged with excrement, and his open eyes stared humorlessly at the unfeeling stars.

 

“Brother,” Thor wheezed.  “I am sorry.”

 

Loki didn’t respond, didn’t take his eyes from overhead, nor did his expression change by even the tiniest movements.

 

Thor understood then better than he had before what it cost Loki to hope.  He felt the despair threatening to sap him of his will, and he shook himself hard, rising with a suppressed groan and hobbling to Loki to offer him a hand up.

 

Loki raised his arm as if it were arthritic, a slow and pained motion that pulled a wheeze from his lungs.  Thor helped him up gently, steadied him with a hand at his back, and the Loki was shuffling unsteadily toward the byre, saying, “Leave me alone,” in a voice wrung of all inflection.

 

Defeated, Thor did as he was asked, sacrificing what was left of his brother’s precious hour.

 

The next morning, Lorne entered the cottage with a perplexed expression, holding himself somewhat stiffly and rubbing his lower back.  When he noticed Thor looking, he dropped his hand and with a strange, furtive look moved toward the table.

 

“Are you well?” Thor asked, moving to help the man to a seat, but Lorne indicated by a gesture that he did not need Thor’s help.

 

“I believe Bruce may have kicked me accidentally while I slept.  I have a sizeable bruise.”  He indicated the area of his tailbone.

 

“Can I help you in any way?”  Thor asked, pulling out a chair for Lorne and setting a cup of steaming tea down before him.

 

“No, thank you.  I have a liniment that should ease some of the tenderness.  I’ll only need some privacy to apply it later.”

 

“Of course,” Thor answered, trying not to remember all the times he had tended to his brother’s wounds, usually incurred in pursuit of some unwise mischief.

 

They ate peaceably enough, though Lorne was clearly in more pain than he’d admit.  Thor did the dishes as always and then left the man to ease his own suffering.

 

He’d already decided that he’d spend the day in the wilderness, attempting to discover the root of the magic he’d felt the day before.  But when he told Lorne where he was going—though not why, naturally—Lorne grew agitated.

 

“You mustn’t enter the old forest.  There are things there—monsters.  It is very dangerous.”  That the unflappable Lorne should be so overcome by the mere suggestion of entering the woods told Thor that he must be on the right track.

 

“I assure you, I can take care of myself,” he said in a soothing voice.

 

Lorne only flinched and shook his head, raising his hands as if to beg.

 

“Please,” he said.  “Do not go.”

 

Thor wished he did not have to distress his companion so, but there was nothing for it.  He must go into the forest.  He offered further assurances, which had no discernible effect on Lorne’s fear.  
  
  


Finally, he simply walked away, tossing foolish platitudes over his shoulder like some doddering old man convinced of his wisdom.

 

Lorne’s fears proved true, as it turned out, but not in the way he’d expected.

 

The forest was, indeed, a habitation of fierce creatures.  After the third attack of a winged, clawed, and/or sharp-toothed predator, Thor leaned against a tree trying to catch his breath and considered that perhaps he should retreat.  He’d come only a short way into the woods, but the woods clearly wanted him gone.

 

Straightening, Thor hefted Stormbreaker and set out once more.

 

Two more nightmarish creatures were beaten back before She appeared.

 

One moment Thor was wiping gore from his cheek and wishing for a tankard of mead to ease his parched throat.

 

The next, he was staring at a vision in graveyard white like a corpse shroud.  She was bathed in a nebulous greenish light.  Her long, black hair fell down her back in a light-killing wave.  Her deep black eyes likewise grasped him and pulled.  He was powerless to resist—he didn’t even try.

 

Soon, he was close enough that he could smell Her, a deep, dank odor like forest leaves rotting in stagnant water, and something else, something cold and eternal, suggesting the killing depth of a bottomless well.

 

She raised a long-nailed hand as if to touch him, and he flinched.

 

Her eyes went flat, anger pinching Her pale lips to two thin lines in Her hard face.

 

“Who are you that you have trespassed here?”  Her voice resonated as if it came out of the black maw of a bottomless cave.  Thor felt it against his bones, and he shuddered.

 

Aware of the peril of proffering his name, Thor answered indirectly.

 

“I come seeking the power of this place to ask a boon.”

 

Her lip curled in a smile more hungry than humorous.

 

 _Beware boons_ , he thought, knowing even as he’d said it what he’d give to have Loki free.

 

“What have you to trade, Thunder God?” She said his name as if it left a foul taste behind as it left Her mouth.

 

The chill in his bones deepened at her use of his appellation. 

 

“What would you have of me?” he parried.

 

This time, the sneer was accompanied by a long, searing examination from the tips of his toes to his shock of hair, lingering overlong on his manhood and the false eye, a disturbing speculation lighting Her eyes as she looked.

 

“You’re repulsive,” She said at last, dismissively, but there was still appetite in Her glance.

 

Cold slickness coated his stomach, and he felt his gorge rising against Her implication.  He swallowed it down, squaring his shoulders and forcing his teeth to unclench.

 

“Yet you want me.  What does that make you, I wonder?”  He found that he was channeling Loki’s arch condescension, and it gave him the tiniest flicker of warmth.  His brother would have eaten Her alive without straining his tongue.

 

“Your better, boy,” She promised.  Darkness fell like a lash over him, the trees leaning in as if listening.  Hair roots burst from the earth at his feet, encasing his ankles in snaky chains before he could so much as move.

 

He summoned thunder, and it did not come.  He opened his hands and threw his head back, inviting the lightning.  That, too, failed him.

 

“You’re a fool,” She spat, and with a gesture the roots receded, and the trees rustled back to stillness, and She was gone in a wash of rank air that clogged his nose and made his eyes water.

 

He stumbled from the wilderness a short time later, his heart still shaking in his belly and turning his bowels to icy soup.  He almost failed to free himself before the sizzling stream of piss left him, and he watered the grass for what felt like hours, helpless against the release, ashamed to have been so thoroughly outmatched even as he recognized witchcraft in his body’s extreme reaction.

 

Humbled and afraid, Thor returned to Lorne’s cottage, only realizing it was a glorious, golden day when Lorne’s smile met him at the gate and beckoned him without a word into the warm, golden hum of the garden, where he spent a long time sitting beneath the arbor’s fledgling shoots, sipping the sweet, hot liquid Lorne had brought him, and trying to forget how it felt to be so unmanned.

 

Lorne didn’t pry, and he didn’t linger.  He went about his business in the garden, tending the herbs, harvesting the earliest flowers for drying, humming to himself and talking now and again to the birds that twittered inquiringly from the apple tree in the corner.   A sunny spot on the wall was occupied by a drowsing Jotun, who twitched in his sleep like he was chasing an especially spry mouse.

 

The easy sounds of the happy space, the sunlight dappling his shoulders, the smell of herbs and fresh-turned earth, and the promise of the season in all its ebullience finally eased something open in Thor, and he felt strong again.

 

He offered to help, and soon he was standing in the warm byre, cleaning manure out of the straw and strewing fresh hay in the manger for the cows, who stood patiently by, watching him with their gentle gazes and now and then offering him a trace of their sweet breath.

 

The sun was warmer here, broken only by the rough bark roof of the byre.  He felt logy with it, his muscles lax and heavy, and he wanted to lie down in the field and sleep.

 

That he could lie down if he wanted to, lie down in the middle of the day, no one to ask anything of him, no demands on his time or necessity of keeping up an appearance of strength—that struck him as almost revolutionary. 

 

That he _would_ rest—now or at all—seemed a violation of his promise to his brother. 

 

Remembering that Loki had spent the night before here in the straw and could see the fields only by the light of the moon, never in the heat of the sun, punctured Thor’s contentment, and soon enough his shoulders were tight with the weight of his burden and his mouth turned down in an unconscious frown.

 

Lorne came to find him at supper time, and he went wordlessly, washing up at the pump in the yard, bringing water in for warming over the fire for the evening’s dishes.  It was stew tonight, a thick brown broth seasoned with spicy herbs and crowded with potatoes and carrots and other roots Thor couldn’t name.  There was no meat in it, he noted.

 

After the dishes were clean and dry and stowed away safely in their cupboard, Thor said, “I can hunt for tomorrow’s supper, if you’d like.”

 

Lorne seemed startled to hear Thor’s voice, but the expression of surprise was replaced almost at once by apologetic regret.  He shook his head. 

 

“I don’t hunt the animals in the valley.  We have an agreement, they and I.  They stay out of my garden, and I leave them to find their food elsewhere, unmolested.”

 

“But you have cattle and pigs and chickens?”

 

Lorne shrugged.  “They serve a purpose.  They are companions and friends.  Only after they’ve lived a long and happy life do I ask them to make a sacrifice for my larder.  Mostly, I keep them for company.  That bacon we’ve been eating at breakfast was an old boar I’d had for almost fifteen years.  Old Laufey was a good friend of mine.  Had he not fallen ill, I’d never have thought to help him pass into the next life.”

 

Thor boggled, struck at once by a number of conclusions.

 

For one thing, it would never have occurred to Loki that meat came from animals who were tended and cared for by people like Lorne.  Such people were beneath Loki’s consideration. 

 

For another, had Thor himself not had plenty of humbling experience in rebuilding his little community, he himself may have dismissed Lorne’s attitude as sentimental dreck.

 

But watching Lorne’s face as he talked about a favorite pig, the conclusion was inescapable:  Here was a kind and decent man, a man who considered the moral implications of the simplest decisions, such as what to have for breakfast.

 

It was humbling but also painful, yet another glaring reminder that this wise and gentle soul was nothing like the brother whose face he wore.

 

Another night passed in mostly silent companionship, Lorne reading a book—Djenna apparently acted as an itinerate librarian, too—and Thor staring into the fire, listening to its quiet stirrings and stroking Jotun’s silky back, the cat having apparently decided that Thor’s lap was a suitable replacement for Lorne’s.

 

That night, he insisted that Lorne sleep in his own bed.  “I’ll take the byre,” he said, making it clear that it wasn’t an offer so much as an order.

 

When Lorne seemed ready to argue, Thor added, “You’ve offered me the hospitality of hearth and home for several days now.  If you will not let me hunt for you, then I must insist you let me help in other ways.  You’re still sore from last night’s rest.”  Indeed, Lorne had been obviously stiff and slow all afternoon.  “Let me sleep in the byre.  And if I am to make a more permanent arrangement here, we will find a solution that lets us both sleep indoors.”

 

Lorne seemed almost alarmed at the prospect of sharing the cottage, but Thor ignored his expression, instead moving toward the door and out into the night, which was loud with spring frogs announcing that the new season was well underway.

 

He had no intention of sleeping, of course.  He wanted to be awake for Loki’s return.  The day’s adventures must have caught him up, however, for the next thing he knew, a booted foot was kicking his own in an increasingly harder rhythm.

 

“Alright,” he groaned, sitting upright.  “I’m awake.”

 

Loki smirked at him from the edge of the byre.  When Thor put a hand through his hair to push it back, he understood why; straw showered his shoulders and pattered around him as he rose.

 

“Country life suits you, brother,” Loki mocked.  There was something sharp and fragile in his eyes.  “You smell like shit.”  His eyes tracked to a cow patty not far from where Thor had made his bed in the straw.

 

Thor shrugged himself awake and ran a hand over his face, trying to wipe away the weariness.  He was a god; he didn’t need to rest.  Yet he felt as if his bones had been dipped in concrete, his muscles strung to the breaking point. 

 

Loki didn’t look much better than he felt.  
  
  


“I met someone in the woods yesterday,” Thor began, but Loki held up his hand.

 

“I’m not interested in fairy tales.  I want something to eat, and I’d kill for Asgardian mead.  Let us spend an hour forgetting.”

 

Thor wasn’t yet ready for resignation, but the leashed fury of lightning seemed to strain less this night, as if he was too tired to access it.  He thought perhaps Loki had the right idea.  Oblivion was unlikely, not on the mortal mead Lorne made, but at least they could spend some time as brothers, pretending things were as they used to be.

 

So Thor made Loki a big meal, bacon and eggs sizzling in grease and thick slices of bread dipped in bacon fat and grilled to brown perfection.  He poured Loki cup after cup of Lorne’s homebrew, and Loki pounded it all down with astonishing speed.

 

They sat across the table from one another, Thor nursing his own cup, watching for the cracks in Loki’s composure.

 

But his brother was brittle and sharp, like thin ice over deep, moving waters.  He gave nothing away of the dangers roiling beneath that sly surface.

 

Thor was too tired to be baited into poking him, so he simply watched, feeling his heart beating away at the scant minutes they had left to spend together.

 

When the time was almost up, Loki stood up from the table, wiped his mouth on Lorne’s sleeve, and slouched back to the bed in the corner, where he was asleep almost as soon as he’d stretched out.

 

Thor spent the lonely wee hours cleaning up the evidence of their late-night meal and trying to distract himself from his brother’s pain by making a list of his next steps in seeking a cure for Loki’s condition.

 

When Lorne awoke that morning, Thor was still at the table, though the other couldn’t have known he’d spent the night there.

 

He got up to greet him, Lorne’s eyes searching his face with some concern, and Thor offered a weak smile and a hearty misdirection about going to town again and went as far as the first bend in the road, behind a copse of trees, before summoning Stormbreaker and using her to disappear.

 

Thus was established the pattern of their days and nights.  Thor would spend the days searching for the woman in the woods, teasing folktales and ghost stories out of the locals with ale and tall tales of his own, and exploring further and further afield for any sign that might help free Loki from his thrall.

 

He’d try to be home for supper, which he’d spend in comfortable silence or occasional conversation with Lorne, who was an easy, undemanding companion.

 

One day in the second week of his stay, Thor returned to find a mattress with fresh, sweet hay ticking propped against the wall inside the door.  Draped over its top, neatly folded, was a fine wool blanket, obviously new. 

 

“I thought you’d like to sleep inside now that the midges have started to emerge.”

 

In fact, the bugs didn’t bother Thor, but he was grateful for the trust Lorne showed him and the expense and trouble he must have gone to to make the mattress and purchase the blanket.  Djenna must have been by recently, and Thor was suddenly ashamed of all the time he’d spent away.  He must, of course, do anything to save his brother, but Lorne was an innocent bystander and didn’t deserve the way Thor seemed to take him for granted.

 

What he was going to do when it came time to send Lorne away—for that’s how he thought if it in his head, as though Lorne would be going on a long journey, not, in effect, dying…  Well, Thor wasn’t sure, and he told himself he was being practical, not cowardly, in refusing to think of it for the time being. 

 

He was, after all, no closer to breaking Loki’s curse. 

 

All his wanderings, all the hours of interrogation had produced precious little but an assertion that the darkest things of this world lived in the wilderness.  The people spoke of the defenseless village as though the petty-minded bickering they called civilization protected them from the elements of chaos and destruction that lurked within a stone’s throw from some of their own farms.

 

Thor knew better.  Every time he stepped foot in those woods, he was assailed by the worst feelings—wild helplessness, crushing despair, a certainty that there would never again be light or peace in his life.  And no matter how he fought those sensations, trudging deeper and deeper into the ghoul-haunted shadows, Thor never encountered Her, the one whom he thought must hold the key to his brother’s imprisonment. 

 

As for that brother…a precious single hour each night was spent drinking with Loki, talking by the fire or sometimes walking along the rutted lane that passed for a road through Lorne’s valley. Often, Loki asked for news of New Asgard.  At first, he’d ask after people they’d grown up with, but soon they both wearied of hearing Thor report the named dead.  Then it was more general questions about crop yields and dwelling places and public buildings, details they likewise both understood Loki didn’t really care about. 

 

Other nights—the bad ones, which came with more frequency the longer Thor stayed—Loki would ask Thor about Lorne, the nature and tone of his questions varying depending on his moods, which ran a spectrum from viciously satirical to depressively monosyllabic.

 

“Is he a good fuck?” Loki asked on a night when he was apparently feeling particularly savage.

 

It took Thor too long to answer Loki’s question, mostly because he was at first confused—he’d never considered sleeping with Lorne—then surprised because his brother sounded _jealous_.

Dismissing this conclusion as ridiculous, Thor finally lifted his mug to his lips and said, “I wouldn’t know.”

 

Loki’s snort expressed his disbelief quite eloquently.

 

When Thor lowered his mug to confront his brother, however, Loki was looking down at his own empty cup, and he didn’t seem inclined to follow through on his initial question.

 

Unwisely, Thor let it go.

 

Like an uncleaned wound, the question festered.  It came up several more times during the next ten night-hours they had together, until Thor found himself thinking about it after Loki had disappeared into Lorne.  Thor lay awake on his mattress trying not to consider Lorne’s lithe strength, his gentle demeanor…the beloved, familiar face, which more and more often looked upon him with an easy joy in the company and the shared, ordinary tasks of their days.

 

It would be a terrible violation of nature, Thor thought, even if it were technically not his brother whom he seduced (and leaving aside that Loki wasn’t really Thor’s brother by birth at all, a fact Thor had some practice ignoring).  Blood brother or not, surely the universe would not allow such a thing.

 

With a shake of his head and a sharp, internal word, Thor banished the thought, turned over with a huff, and forced his eyes closed.

 

Even in sleep, though, his mind wouldn’t rest.  He awoke one morning from a confusing montage of erotic images—long, pale fingers holding him, piercing green eyes hooded with lust, red lips panting his name—to aching arousal.  Lorne was still asleep, his breath a calming counterpart to Thor’s racing pulse.

 

He tried to banish his erection with reminders that it was his brother’s body he was thinking of, but the forbidden thrill of it served only to further fire his lust, until he had to take himself in hand and with a few rough tugs and a name bitten tightly between his teeth, never to be uttered, he came all over his hand and his belly, feeling ashamed and wildly triumphant at the same time.

 

He fled the cottage almost at once, pausing only to clean himself up and leave Lorne a hastily scrawled note, and found himself in the forest again, Stormbreaker in hand, blood racing with the desire to distract himself from what had just occurred.

 

He penetrated further into the wilderness’ murky depths.  The deeper he went into the forest, the stranger the light grew.  The trees were shrouded in a filmy plant that draped from their lower branches and caught in his hair or brushed across his face.  The touch seemed deliberate, and it made him shudder, try as he might to tell himself that he was imagining things.

 

The grey moss and the heavy canopy of leaves overhead drenched the air in sepia, as if he were traveling under dirty pond water or staring through a filthy cotton rag.  The ground was densely carpeted in dead leaves so old that his footsteps turned them to powder, which soon rose in a cloud around him, further obscuring the suffocating air.

 

He could hear nothing but his blood pounding in his ears and his breath, which seemed stentorian in the unnatural stillness all around him.

 

She appeared when Thor was just considering the wisdom of continuing his progress.  The path had narrowed to a game trail that wound through the grasping roots of enormous trees clad in a scaly grey bark that stank like pisswater.  There was a distant noise so low that he almost couldn’t hear it, and if it weren’t for his back teeth vibrating at the wrongness of it, he would have thought he was going mad.

 

He had paused to look around him, and between a glance to his left and a glance to his right, She was there, standing a dozen feet away on the path ahead.  He’d swear that where Her feet touched them, the roots smoked and shriveled, and the air was suddenly hot with static, which prickled up his arms and raised every hair on his body.

 

Knowing it was futile, Thor still tried to summon his power.  This time, he sensed a faint crackling in his fingertips, and for a moment, the fresh, clean scent of ozone left him light-headed with relief.

 

Then the power died and Her stench—rank, filthy flesh; stagnant water in which dead things rotted; mossy teeth and tongues furry with mold—washed over him.  Thor struggled to remain stone-faced, swallowing the saliva that flooded his mouth and willing his gorge down with straining effort.

 

With a gesture, She banished the stench and in its place a greenish-yellow light, like pus condensed to a fog, drew across the surrounding trees like a curtain. 

 

 A smile crept over Her lips that made him shiver.

 

“Well, you’re capable of surprising me after all,” She said, taking two slinking steps towards him.  Somehow, Her stride ate half the distance between them, and he fought every instinct of will and experience not to back away from Her.

 

Summoning every iota of strength he’d ever possessed, Thor looked Her in the eyes.

 

“I want my brother freed of this place, and I want it done immediately.”  It had sounded less petulant in his head, but Thor was just relieved that his voice came out even and the words emerged clear and intelligible.  His insides were doing a tarantella, and he feared that he might embarrass himself.

 

“You’re in no position to make demands of me, Thunder God.”

 

“Then we’ll bargain.”

 

What devil possessed his tongue in that moment, Thor couldn’t say, though it sounded an awful lot like his brother.

 

She raised an eyebrow, one corner of Her grim mouth turning upward in a cruel smirk.

 

“You already know what I want of you.”

 

Thor did.  Or thought he did.  Whatever She wanted with him couldn’t be nearly so perverse as the dream that had driven him out of Lorne’s cottage that morning.

 

But when She closed the space between them, when he could feel the killing cold pouring off of her skin, see the veins blue-green beneath the fish-belly pale, like spoiled cheese, spy the wholly unnatural appetite that lit her eyes with a carnal glee, Thor wasn’t sure he could command himself to be still and let Her do Her worst, not even for Loki’s freedom.

 

He steeled himself for Her touch, closing his eyes, and felt her fingers like searing talons flensing strips of his throat away.  He fully expected her to lean in and set her teeth in the ravaged flesh, to gulp down his lifeblood greedily.

 

He waited for death, hoping that Loki would somehow know what he had done, know and understand and forgive Thor for everything, and thinking, too, of Lorne, who would see Thor’s failure to return as the ultimate confirmation of his biding terror of the woods and the wastes, of everything out here beyond his safe little valley.

 

A hiss drew his eyes open, and he looked down at Her to see Her backing away from him, the skin of Her fingertips on the hand that had touched him turning black and shriveling, like figs left too long in the sun.  Her lips were pale grey, drawn back over Her pointed teeth, and Her tongue was an obscene red worm peeking between them.

 

Then She laughed, and a shower of decayed leaves fell around them, and the pus-fog retreated, to be replaced by a roiling cloud of dust, covering the ground at knee-level and racing toward them both.

 

When it reached them, it rose like a geyser to envelop her, and She disappeared, though Her final words lingered overlong in the choking, dead air of the place:

 

“You have nothing to offer, Thunderer.  You’ve already bargained away anything I’d want.”

 

When Thor raised a shaking hand to his throat and then brought his fingers away, he was astonished to find them dry and clean but for a thin patina of stinking dust.

 

Were it not for the niggling uneasiness that had taken up residence in the back of his skull, Thor might have dismissed the entire episode as a hallucination.  He had never been as adept at deception as his brother, however, and denial was beyond him now.

 

He knew why such as She might say he had already made a devil’s bargain:  The dream he had had that morning had chased him into the wilderness and left its mark on him forever.  He’d already given up one thing for another, hadn’t he?  Lorne in the daylight, his gentle smile, the familiar eyes with their unfamiliar contentment, the beloved figure bent to work or leaning against the warm stone wall of the garden, the lips curled in a welcoming grin that belonged to Lorne alone…

 

Thor was doomed.

 

It took him the rest of a long, dull, yellow afternoon to make his way back to the edge of the woods, and then he hesitated there where the shadows of the great trees had blighted the grass in semi-circles.  Where clear sunlight fell, all was green.

 

Thor had never indulged much in superstition, but he felt somehow that if he let the light of the sun touch him, he’d be burned to ashes, blasted through by a clean light that could not stand his contamination.

 

But because he had also never indulged much in self-pity, he drew up his shoulders, took a long, cleansing breath, and stepped out toward the path that led back to Lorne’s cottage.

 

The smile that greeted him was relieved and warm, and he felt guilty all at once for disappearing so surreptitiously, sneaking away without letting the man know where he was going.  He wondered, not for the first nor even the fifteenth time, if he should find lodging in Ooslot. 

 

Despite his deep unease with the idea of being surrounded by prying eyes and gossiping tongues, he thought perhaps the other would feel better for having his home back.

 

He could always travel to the cottage at night and wait for Loki to rise from Lorne’s bed.

 

But Lorne said, so softly Thor wasn’t sure he’d heard him right, “I was afraid perhaps you’d finally grown bored of this life,” and Thor all at once understood Lorne’s expression had been informed by Thor’s absence.

 

“Do you not grow tired of my company?” he teased, realizing only after his words left his mouth that he was flirting.

 

Lorne blushed and turned his eyes away, watching the progress of a bird among the arbor’s green fingers of new growth.

 

Then he gave Thor his eyes and said, quite directly, “I do not think that is possible.”

 

It was Thor’s turn to feel heat rising in his cheeks, his part to look away.  The bird was chasing a fat beetle that put up a frantic buzz as it attempted its escape.

 

“You hardly know me,” Thor was horrified to hear himself say.  Such a statement implied an intimacy he hadn’t known until right then that they’d been sharing for some time already.  Loki would laugh him to death if he could see Thor now.

 

The thought had the effect of ice water on his ardor, and Thor swallowed hard and turned away, half-blind with imagining his hands on his brother’s white skin, his brother’s lips opening for a kiss.

 

“Have I said something to offend you?” Lorne asked, and Thor heard his approach before he felt Lorne’s hand on his shoulder.

 

Thor shook his head, but whether answering Lorne’s question or denying his own desires, he couldn’t say.

  
The next moment, Lorne was turning him with surprisingly strong hands into the circle of his arms, and Thor was appalled to feel himself leaning on Lorne’s lean strength, dropping his head to his shoulder, muffling a sound that was treacherously like a sob.

 

Lorne held him for a long time, until shadows stretched their fingers into the cracks of the wall and the bird had caught its protesting prey and begun the noisy work of cracking the beetle’s hard shell.

 

When Thor at last straightened, intending to apologize for his weakness, Lorne leaned up to kiss him, just a gentle, steady pressure against his lips, and Thor, caught by surprise, opened his mouth as if to say, “No,” or “Yes,” or “Please,” and the tip of a warm tongue ghosted across his lower lip, and then he was pulling Lorne up and in with a broad hand on the back of his skull, tilting his head so he could open Lorne’s mouth wide, so he could plunder him with tongue and teeth and swallow the breathless, “Oh, oh, oh,” sound Lorne made at every stroke.

 

Damned or not, it was the most glorious kiss Thor had ever had, and when they at last parted, he was panting so hard he was dizzy with it, and he couldn’t stop the grin that split his face even if he’d wanted to.

 

For his part, Lorne looked dazed and gorgeous, lips reddened by Thor’s kiss, pupils dark, shoulders heaving with his own desperate need for air.

 

Glorious, indeed.

 

For several moments, Thor didn’t see his brother in Lorne at all.  The eyes with the happy, lustful glow, the lips with the sloppy, ridiculous grin—these were not the features of Loki, who always appeared calculating and sly, even when he was resting or enjoying an innocent pleasure.

 

And then Thor remembered that tonight he’d have to explain the beard burn on Lorne’s chin to Loki, whose chin it also was, and his stomach gave just enough warning that he could turn away and project his vomit over the wall, where the stringy bile wouldn’t kill anything precious to Lorne.

Lorne’s hand on his shoulder made him flinch, and the hand was removed as quickly as it had come.  When he looked up, realizing how this all must appear to Lorne, the man was gone, and Thor swallowed bitterness and guilt and went to seek him out, to try to explain, though he couldn’t very well say, _I’ve never kissed my brother before_.

 

Because, of course, he hadn’t…precisely. 

 

Lorne was sitting at the kitchen table, the kettle steaming on the hook over the fire. He was clasping and unclasping his hands, staring hard at a scuff mark on the tabletop.  He wouldn’t look up when Thor came in, and Thor felt his heart sinking.  His stomach gave an experimental heave, and Thor swallowed hard and ignored it.

 

“I’m sorry, my friend.  I didn’t mean to…”  To what?  Kiss Lorne back?  Vomit after that kiss?  Reject Lorne’s comfort?  All of it?  None?

 

“It’s quite alright,” Lorne answered, still not looking at Thor directly.  “I understand.  It’s been a long time since I’ve…  That is, I’ve never kissed anyone before, I don’t think.  I was just sitting here trying to remember, but the truth is—I should have told you.  That I’m— That is, I have no right to kiss you.  I’m…cursed.”

 

He paused, taking a deep breath, and Thor watched his hands fold and unfold, fold and unfold, the fingers expressing more than his tone betrayed of how much his disability bothered him.  For the first time, Thor understood that Lorne was as much a victim of his brother’s curse as Loki was.

 

He made an encouraging sound, and Lorne continued.

 

“I don’t remember anything that happened to me before I came to the cottage.  The villagers have intimated that I was something of a trouble-maker.  Before.  Before I came here.  But I don’t recall any of it.  There was an—well, I guess you’d call it an accident?  And,” Lorne shrugged, “I never recovered myself.  I’m… _wrong_.  I’ve never minded before now, but it would be nice, I’ll admit, to have some point of reference for what we just—that is, for what I just did to you.  Which you obviously didn’t like.  I am sorry for that.”

 

It was the longest string of words Lorne had ever spoken to him, and every new revelation squeezed Thor’s stomach harder, until he could feel the acid burning the back of his throat.  
  


  
He was an awful guest and a terrible person, and he should just leave.

 

But Lorne was finally looking at him, and there was such sadness and regret and penitence in his gaze that it wrung a noise of protest out of Thor, and before he could think about how it would be taken, he’d dropped to one knee beside Lorne’s chair, disentangled his hands, and taken them in his own, dropping a kiss on the back of one and then the other.

 

Looking up at Lorne, he said, “You have no need to apologize, my friend.  It is _I_ who owe _you_ —an apology _and_ an explanation.  I was not distressed by our kiss, and I’m sorry that I made you feel as if you were somehow to blame.  Only, do you remember that I told you how much you look like my brother?”

 

It was Lorne’s turn to make a wounded sound, and he tried to pull his hands away to cover his suddenly flushed cheeks.  “Gods, I am a fool!” he said, chiding himself and looking anywhere but at Thor.

 

“No!  No, you’re not.  Not at all.  I—I enjoyed our kiss.  I’d even…like to do it again.”  Suddenly more nervous than he could ever remember being, Thor held his breath until blood thunder roared in his ears.

 

Lorne’s sweet smile, his shining eyes meeting Thor’s, sparked a warm, low-burning flame in Thor’s belly.

 

Before Thor could chase the feeling, Lorne’s smile had faded, and he was shaking his head, eyes fixed on their intertwined hands.

 

“There’s something wrong with me, Thor.  I haven’t told you all of it.  I have these…dreams, I guess you’d call them.  And I see myself as if from outside.  I’m usually angry and violent.  I curse at the sky and scream and hurl the furniture and sometimes hurt myself.  And I’ll wake up with cuts or bruises or aches and pains I can’t otherwise explain.  I haven’t had them lately. Not much at all since—since you arrived.  But… I-I think I’m mad.”

 

The last words were spoken on a broken whisper.  Thor’s fingers were going numb in Lorne’s suddenly desperate grip, and Lorne was shaking like a sapling in a thunderstorm.

 

“There is nothing wrong with you that time can’t fix,” Thor said, trying to be comforting.

 

When Lorne’s hopeful eyes, damp with unshed tears, fastened on Thor’s face, Thor realized the mistake he’d made.  Hadn’t Loki taught him the cost of hope?

 

What was he going to tell Lorne, that for an hour each night he became someone else, transformed into Thor’s beloved lost brother?  Was he to say that Lorne wasn’t real, that he was a punishment inflicted upon Loki for all eternity?

 

Thor shook his head and said, “I’m sorry.  I shouldn’t promise what I cannot deliver.  I only meant to offer you comfort and to say—”

 

He hesitated, feeling his heart once again throwing itself against his ribs like a trammeled hare.

 

Then he committed to Lorne’s sweet smile, kind eyes, the way he chivvied the chickens out of their eggs in the morning, the way his shoulders relaxed when he heard a warbler singing in the sweetgrass.  The way he watched Thor sometimes when he thought Thor wasn’t looking, a bashful wonder and a yearning light in his eyes that made Thor feel young and hopeful himself, as if all the long years of his life, all the destruction he’d witnessed and been a party to, all the terrible mistakes with their horrific human costs had sloughed away and left him just this—a man who had feelings for a man.  A man who could be looked upon with wonder and yearning.

 

Thor said, “To tell you that I’ll be here for you.  That I’ll stay, and I won’t leave you until you’re well and whole again,” and his words were a promise and a lie, a paradox born of Loki’s peculiar and perverse punishment.

 

As soon as he said them, he wanted to recant the words; they were too much, too heavy a burden, soon picked up but impossible to release.  He opened his mouth to take back his words, to expel them like a stone from his belly, when Lorne put a hand on his cheek and leaned down for a kiss.

 

With that plighting, Thor forgot his misgivings, letting the heat of Lorne’s mouth, the sweetness of his tongue, the hungry little noises he made drive away his doubts.

 

He should have known better—he could hear his brother sneering, _You were always a slow learner, brother_ —but he let himself have the warmth and the pleasure and willed away the rest for the time it took for the room to go dark with true night and his knee to grow stiff from kneeling.

 

When they parted, Lorne’s eyes were only a spark of green fire in the dim kitchen.  Somewhere outside, Jotun yowled like a harbinger.

 

“I should see to supper,” Lorne said, and Thor nodded jerkily and rose, using the need for firewood as a cover for the sudden awkwardness between them.

 

Outside, the stars were obscured by a thin scum of clouds scudding swiftly through the sky.  There was no wind in the yard.  The apple tree in the corner of the garden was motionless.  At the top of the wall, Jotun stood like a statue, his eyes reflecting the sliver of light the moon leaked from behind its shroud.

 

The air felt fraught, tight like his shoulders, and Thor called the cat to come in, foreboding driving his voice to sharpness.  The cat ignored him, as cats were wont to do, and with a bitten curse, he turned back toward the house with a great armful of wood.

 

Inside, the lamps spilled burnished light over Lorne, who stood at the sink peeling potatoes and dropping them into a potful of water.

 

Thor built the fire up, taking more time than was strictly necessary while he tried to gather his thoughts.  All the signs pointed to disaster looming over them, and it wasn’t difficult to trace the origin of the catastrophe to the error that had catalyzed it:  He should never have kissed Lorne.

 

But when he rose from his crouch, dusting his hands free of bark and splinters, and Lorne turned from his work to look at him, Thor felt heat like a hand around his heart and his manhood.  He couldn’t lie to himself, regardless of the cost.

 

He wanted Lorne.  
  
  


And judging from the look Lorne was giving him, he wanted Thor as well.

 

“We should—” he started to say but he found he had to clear his throat, and by the time he’d opened his mouth to speak again, Lorne had crossed the scant feet between them and taken Thor’s hand.

 

With a glance at the bed, at once shy and wanting, Lorne signaled his intention.

 

Thor felt his pulse quaking in his throat, felt the frantic rush of blood through his veins. 

 

Then, with an expression of mischief almost worthy of Loki himself, Lorne slid his free hand down Thor’s flank and across his belly, slowing only enough to let Thor stop him if he would.

  
  
When he did not, Lorne moved further, using his long-fingered, brilliant hand to trace the shape of Thor’s hardness through his trousers.

 

“Oh,” Thor breathed, eyes fluttering closed against the feeling of it.  It had been a very long time since he’d been thus touched.

 

The heat of Lorne’s breath gave him a moment’s warning before the hot, wet dart of Lorne’s tongue tasted the pulse at his throat, and Thor groaned this time, throwing his head back to let Lorne have his way.

 

As he tasted the column of Thor’s throat, his tongue searing like a brand, Lorne’s hand continued its gentle exploration of Thor’s cock, which was straining mightily against his fly, begging for release.

 

When Lorne left off the motion in favor of undoing Thor’s fly, Thor recovered enough of himself to realize he was being terribly selfish and also that they were about to reach a point of no return.  
  
  


Thus far, he could write off their intimacy to innocent exploration, to satisfying Lorne’s inexperience.  But once he was naked—once they both were—there was no going back to how things had been before.

 

If Thor made love to Lorne, it would be that—love, in all its complicated, messy glory. 

 

Could he live with having seduced this man who was, for all intents and purposes, his brother?

 

Before he could still Lorne’s deft motions or make a sound, Lorne had freed him, wrapping a hot, work-callused hand around him and stroking him from the base to the tip, a sound of wonder falling from his lips.

 

Thor’s whole body bucked at the touch, and Lorne made a surprised, “Oh!” before Thor pulled him in, trapping his hand on his cock between them and ravaging his mouth, biting his lower lip and then transferring his attention to Lorne’s neck, where he wasted no time sucking a love-mark onto the blank, pale canvas of the skin there.  
  
  


Seeing that mark, seeing Lorne’s bruised lips and lust-blown eyes, Thor abandoned the last of higher thought with a growl, tugging Lorne toward the bed, leaving him upright long enough to strip him of his simple robes and underthings before urging him down onto the mattress, where Thor soon joined him, having stripped himself with even greater urgency.

 

The first shock of their hot flesh touching from toes to chest wrenched a cry out of Lorne that was echoed in a deeper note by Thor’s own astonished sound.  Nothing had ever felt so good or right.

 

He lowered his weight as Lorne spread his thighs and rocked in the cradle of his pelvis, feeling Lorne’s cock hard against his own, leaving a trail of damp in the hairs on his belly.

 

Lorne said, “Please,” raising his knees and gripping Thor’s shoulders with powerful hands.  “Please,” he said again, trying to thrust upward, to gain even greater and steadier contact.

 

Thor dropped a hand between them and took both of their cocks in his grip.  Lorne cried out, bucking again, and before Thor could establish a rhythm, Lorne was spilling, a stream of tears purling from the corners of his closed eyes.

 

His mouth hung open, red and panting, and the sight of Lorne undone with pleasure brought Thor himself over the edge.

 

With a shout that grew to roof-rattling thunder, he came in a stream on Lorne’s belly, remembering only belatedly to shift to one side as his arms gave out and he collapsed.

 

He might have had a moment of regret that their first time had been so perfunctory, but he didn’t have time to pursue it before he was felled by sleep as though by a blow to the head.

 

He awoke with a start some time later.  The room was dark but for a single sputtering lamp, the other having gone out and the fire having died, and he realized three things almost at once:

 

His belly was itchy with dried spend.  He was as hungry as a starved wolf.  And Lorne was snoring lightly beside him with the tiniest of smiles curling his kiss-reddened lips.

 

Then it occurred to him that at any moment Lorne might transform into Loki and wake up to find his brother’s spend on his belly and said brother naked and sated beside him.  
  


  
That got Thor out of bed and over to the pitcher and bowl, where he wet a cloth, cleaned himself up, and then proceeded to gently remove the evidence of their loving from Lorne, who murmured something in his sleep and then snuggled deeper into his pillow.

 

Thor dressed without thinking of what they’d just done.  He rebuilt the fire and finished peeling the potatoes without thinking.  He put the pot over the fire and sliced bread and got out butter and plates and knives and salt.

 

He didn’t think about his brother’s body rising like a tide beneath him, didn’t think about his brother’s hands on him, his brother’s mouth begging him for completion.  Didn’t think of his brother’s cock, hard and hot in his hand.  Didn’t think of wanting to lay his brother down and lave him open, drive his tongue into his secret places, suck his seed from him while he screamed, drive into him until he broke Thor’s name against his need.

 

No, certainly Thor thought of none of that as he prepared a simple meal and set the table and waited for the man who wasn’t his brother to rise from his bed and come join him.

 

Of course, it was Loki who finally opened those green devil’s eyes and fixed them on Thor, who by this time had finished cooking the potatoes and a rasher of bacon and was eating the haphazard meal while it was still warm.

 

Loki’s eyes fastened on Thor’s just as he seemed to realize that he was naked, and Thor looked away to leave him his modesty while he searched for Lorne’s underthings and robe, which Thor had folded neatly and left on the trunk at the foot of the bed.

 

It must not have been the first time Loki had awoken thus, for though he seemed nonplussed, he said nothing, nor did he seem to suspect that Thor had anything to do with Lorne’s naked state.

 

He sat at the table, took up a fork, made a moue of long-suffering distaste at the simple fare, and selected some potatoes and slices of bacon, apparently hungry enough to overlook the rudeness of the meal.

 

It occurred to Thor to wonder if Loki were ever hungry in that scant hour of freedom, if he were ever desirous of a warm bath or a change of clothes or a different horizon upon which to fix his eyes.  If he missed the sun on his shoulders or the beauty of a rainbow painted across the receding back of a blustering summer storm. 

 

If he ever wanted a warm hand other than his own to touch him, to bring him pleasure.

 

Thor tore his thoughts away from that treacherous path and asked, “Have you met the Woman of the Woods?”  He wasn’t sure why he gave Her that title, but it seemed fitting.

 

Loki’s eyes darkened, and he nodded once, sharply, lips twisting into a bitter sneer.  “My jailer, you mean?”

 

Though Loki’s words confirmed Thor’s suspicions, they were still startling, and Loki picked up on that with a smirk that was partly at Thor’s expense and partly at his own.

 

“Yes, brother, She comes now and then to see that I am still in here.”

 

“And has She told you why you were chosen for such a punishment?”  Thor knew it was a cruel question, but he needed answers, and he hoped that perhaps She had betrayed something of her purpose to the one whose life she held in such crushing abeyance.

 

But Loki shook his head.  “She comes only to gloat and then goes away, taking Her bog-stench and Her ugliness with Her.” 

 

“She must be working for someone.  You can’t have offended the spirits of _this_ land enough to warrant an eternity of retribution.”  He was mostly thinking aloud, which is why his word choice was so careless.  
  


  
Loki hissed and rose so abruptly that his chair tipped back and almost toppled but for his quick, deft hand catching it and righting it with a pointed bang.

 

“I’m sorry, brother.  I didn’t mean to imply that you earned this lot.”

 

“Didn’t you?”  Loki’s sneer was some other kind of ugly now—self-loathing matched by a hatred he had nursed over the terrible years of his desperate exile.

 

“Loki, you do not deserve what has befallen you.  No one would, regardless of his crimes in life.  I only meant that if you had known of this place before your…arrival…it might give me a place to begin in trying to find the counter-curse.”

 

Loki shook his head.  “There is no counter-curse, Thor. Why will you not accept that this is my fate?  I am doomed, brother, and nothing your vaunted strength or ridiculous courage can manifest will help me.”

 

“Have you given up so soon?”  As soon as the words left his mouth, Thor knew they were a mistake.

 

Loki advanced on him to within a hair’s breadth.  This close, Thor could smell the lingering evidence of their earlier coupling, and he prayed that his brother would not also notice it.

 

“Soon?” Loki murmured, his voice deceptively calm.  “Soon!” 

 

Thor held up his hands.  “I’m sorry, brother.  I did not mean to suggest that—”

 

“Oh, but I think you did mean it, brother.  You meant exactly what you said—that I haven’t been here all that long—after all, how many days does a single hour a night make up, in the long run?  That I haven’t labored over the salvation of our people, haven’t had to rebuild a civilization from nothing.  That I haven’t battled titans and fended off the advances of evil hordes.  No, I’ve cowered here, in this bucolic pastoral idyll, living the good life while my brother did all the work, as usual.  Isn’t that what you really meant, brother?”

 

Loki’s words were poisonous, and Thor shivered at the intensity of his hatred, which radiated from him like a gaseous cloud.

 

The stench of their coupling suddenly turned his stomach, and Thor had to get away from him.  He pushed his chair back and over in his stumbling haste, and he staggered to the door, where he took in huge gusts of clean night air, shaking and trying not to lose his supper.

What had he done to them both?

 

“Loki,” he said, his throat raw as if he _had_ vomited.  “I am sorry, brother.  I’m sorry I didn’t find you sooner, sorry that I could not cure you at once, take you away from this place.” 

_I’m sorry I seduced your counterpart and will do it again as soon as I am able, for I’m a weak, pathetic man not worthy of your love or his._

 

“Maybe you should leave,” Loki said.  “I think it would be easier for me if you weren’t here to remind me of what I cannot be or have.”

 

Thor looked over his shoulder then to see Loki standing with one hand on a chair back, as if to support himself, and his eyes fixed to the floor.  There was a tremor in his hands that spread up his arms and across his back like a contagion, until he was shaking, a fine, steady trembling that betrayed his pain.

 

Thor wanted to go to him, to take him in his arms and offer what comfort he could.  With horror, he realized that should he try to give Loki such brotherly comfort, his body would likely respond to the familiar embrace.

 

He did vomit then, barely clearing the threshold before spewing chunks of potato and bread and shreds of scarcely digested bacon onto the flagstone of the front walk. 

 

At last able to straighten up without fearing another heave, Thor wiped a hand over his sour mouth and considered cleaning up his mess.  But the bucket was in the kitchen beside the sink, and he found he could not face his brother again that night.  So he leaned against the cottage wall beside the door, feeling cowardly and base, and waited until Loki became Lorne once again and fell asleep in the bed where Thor had fucked him.

 

The moon had long set and it was the darkest hour when Thor at last found the courage to enter the cottage once again.

 

The faint light of the ebbing fire cast Lorne’s figure in fitful shadow.  He was lying on his back with an arm flung over his head and his legs spread a little, as if he’d fallen from a great height and landed there.

 

His chest rose and fell in a slow rhythm, and Thor found it soothing to watch.  Asleep, Lorne’s features appeared even more innocent, untouched by worry or care.  Like this, Thor could only find his brother in Lorne if he made a conscious effort, which he avoided just then.  He couldn’t afford to spend more time in selfish guilt for what he and Lorne had done.  It wasn’t fair to Lorne, and it did no good.  Repentance only counted if the offender chose not to repeat the sin.

 

Looking at Lorne, heat welling in his belly, warmth in his heart, Thor knew he was no penitent.

 

He sank onto his mattress, sure he wouldn’t sleep, and awoke stiff and muzzy-headed to feel a cat’s paws kneading his belly and see a splash of morning light across Lorne’s empty bed.  
  
  


By the quality of the light and the lingering odor of breakfast, Thor realized it must be later than he’d thought, the awkward morning after having morphed while he slept into the awkward midday meal.

 

Lorne was in the garden when he approached, and the wary smile he offered made Thor feel like every kind of awful.

 

“Did you sleep well?” Lorne asked before Thor could formulate the appropriate thing to say after having had sex with a man who was wearing his brother’s body and then arguing with said brother himself.

 

“I did,” Thor said.  “And you?”

 

Lorne blushed and ducked his head back to his work. “I did. Only good dreams this time.”

 

Thor couldn’t resist putting a hand on Lorne’s back, just to feel the strength and heat of him.  It was selfish—this whole thing was selfish madness—but when Lorne straightened up and turned into his touch, it was as natural as breathing to open his arms and embrace him, which led to breathless kisses and rather more frantic groping before a pointed throat-clearing separated them as swiftly and definitively as an arrow shot would have done.

 

Djenna was just outside the garden gate holding the reins of her horse in one hand and a basket in the other.  She was grinning like a kid who’d caught her parents doing something naughty, and Thor discovered that he was capable of blushing furiously, a reaction he’d believed was long gone from his repertoire.

 

“I brought you some more books,” she said, lifting the basket by way of indication.  “And wondered if you could make something for the spring malady.”

 

“Of course,” Lorne said, and Thor was gratified to hear that he still sounded a little out of breath.  “Please, come in.”

 

Djenna tied her horse to the gatepost and came through to the cottage, where Lorne took a moment to put the kettle on before moving to his workbench.

 

Thor, who had followed them in, said, “I’ll make the tea.” 

 

For all that he’d helped Lorne with the other duties of his days, the man had never offered to initiate him into the art of potion-making.  Thor had been a little hurt at first—Wasn’t he deft enough with a crushing blade?  Couldn’t he read a recipe like anyone else?—until he’d seen the way Lorne lost himself in the process, a fixed and distant expression on his face, a focused look in his eyes, until he became almost a stranger to Thor once again.

 

Whatever Lorne found in his art, it wasn’t for Thor to trespass upon.

 

Tea he could manage, however, and soon he and Djenna were sipping strong mugs of the day tea Lorne favored and eating the last of a batch of biscuits Lorne had made earlier in the week.

 

They spoke of little things—the coming of spring, the festival planned in Ooslot to celebrate the greening, Djenna’s father’s health, the rapid growth of Lorne’s piglets.

 

Lorne hummed to himself busily, diffusing something over an oil burner and generally so lost in his work that they may as well have been outside.

 

When Djenna leaned over the table, obviously seeking Thor’s confidence, he felt a pang of misgiving that was driven to a sharpness by the woman’s expression, which was grave and even a little forbidding.

 

“It is none of my business what your intentions are, but as Lorne has no one else to stand for him, I will.  Should you hurt him in any way, know that I will come for you in the night, and I will make you regret the day your mother first laid a glimmering eye upon your father.  Am I clear?”

 

Thor swallowed, struck by the murder in her eyes, partly because he understood that she meant her threat and partly because it reminded him of his brother in some of his more colorful moods.

 

He missed Loki, always.

 

“You are a good friend.  Lorne is lucky to have you.  I will do nothing to incur your wrath.” 

 

He stopped short of giving her his word, for he couldn’t actually promise that he wouldn’t hurt Lorne.  Should he find a counter-curse for his brother’s condition, he’d effectively kill Lorne, wouldn’t he?

 

When had his life become one of those maudlin sagas of old, wherein the hero made terrible choices and never repented of them only to have his obvious fate befall him in the most hideous manner possible?  Somewhere, a cosmic audience must be groaning at the irony.

 

As if she sensed that he was holding something vital back, Djenna gave him a hard look, but when he held her eyes, she seemed to relent, at least enough to nod and offer, “He seems happy.”

 

Thor tried to see Lorne through Djenna’s eyes.  He seemed relaxed, content, but then, he always did when he was working.  As if Lorne felt the intensity of their regard, he gave them a glance over his shoulder, his hands still busy at work while his eyes took in first one expression and then the other.

 

Then he smiled, a private little smile only for Thor, and Thor felt his stomach flip and blood rush into his cheeks, and Djenna barked a deep, filthy laugh full of innuendo, and then Lorne ducked back to his work and Thor stared up into the rafters until he could behave like he wasn’t some twelve-year-old boy with his first crush.

 

After Djenna left, still smirking slyly at their expense, Lorne busied himself with cleaning up his work area.  Thor joined him, leaning back against the counter, arms crossed over his chest and eyes on the door, which was open to let in the mild spring evening.

 

“Does it bother you?” Lorne asked quietly, startling Thor out of a daydream that involved taking Lorne to New Asgard and showing him where he did his work, wondering if Lorne would find the bland chamber with its scarred wooden table and topographical maps and tidal and astronomical charts at all interesting.

 

“What?” Thor asked, just as quietly.  There was something solemn in the air, something sacred. 

 

“Djenna knowing about us.”

 

Thor turned to look at Lorne, who gave him only his profile in return.  He couldn’t tell what had prompted Lorne’s question.

 

“Why would it bother me?”

 

“That’s not an answer.”

 

Lorne did turn to him then, and there was a worry there and a kind of pre-emptive sadness, as though he expected Thor’s answer to break his heart.

 

“No, it doesn’t bother me.  Now will you tell me why you would ask such a question?”  Thor dropped his arms to his side, realizing his posture seemed defensive.  Lorne hesitated, seeming torn between two answers, one the painful truth and the other, perhaps, an innocent lie.

 

“I know there’s someone else.  That I’m… .  That I belong here in this place, where you are for now, but that beyond this valley, maybe beyond this world, you have someone you love deeply.  I don’t mind.  If this is all of you I can have—the spring of you, this summer together—I’m content.  To have known your love at all is a great honor.  And a great joy.”

 

For damning minutes, Thor didn’t seem able to formulate a response.  Partly, he was staggered by Lorne’s willingness to sacrifice, to let their love go, to let it be a temporary retreat from the sameness of his days.  And part of him was angry that Lorne would think so little of himself, to be content with second-best, as a consolation prize. 

 

But mostly he was ashamed of himself because of course his reticence, the part of him he held back, would only make sense to Lorne if it were intimate love he was keeping for someone else.

 

And his love for Loki was intimate, as close as two brothers could be, maybe closer for what Loki had given him, that ultimate, irredeemable gift of his life.

 

But their love, Loki’s and Thor’s, wasn’t like Lorne was thinking, was it?

 

The hope in Lorne’s eyes had faded to a flat resignation by the time Thor turned toward him and took him gently in his arms, leaving room between them should Lorne wish to pull away.

 

He touched Lorne’s chin to get him to look at him squarely, and Lorne did, though his eyes were guarded, waiting for the blow Thor’s answer would deliver.

 

“There is no one but you, Lorne, not in that way.  I have told you of my search for my brother.  You know what he means to me and that I intend to find him, come what may.  But I did not leave anyone behind to come here. I cannot promise you forever because no man nor god should have such hubris; it’s folly to tempt fate that way.  But for as long as we can be together, I would like to try, if you’ll have me under those conditions.”

 

In answer, Lorne raised his mouth for a kiss and from that kiss grew a heat between them so rapid and dizzying that Thor didn’t remember all the details of reaching Lorne’s bed or taking off their clothes.

 

He recalled the chest-shaking groan he loosed when Lorne clambered atop him, his skin on fire with the touch of him everywhere.

 

He remembered how smooth Lorne’s skin was between his shoulder blades and how sharp those blades were beneath the skin—the velvet softness against the knife-edge, the wonder of the contrast and the way Lorne writhed against him, making him weak with the need to feel Lorne in every part.

 

There was the scent of Lorne’s hair, honey and woodsmoke, and the sweetness of his breath as he teased Thor’s lips with the barest brush of his own.

 

Lorne’s little “ohs” and the breathless, helpless “ah-ah-ah” he made as Thor worked himself down between Lorne’s straddling thighs to taste him for the first time, and the taste itself, like bitter greens and sun on morning dew and a thousand other things he couldn’t identify.

 

Lorne leaked onto his tongue and babbled and rocked into Thor’s mouth in shallow thrusts, riding Thor’s, pleading for release, and finally shouting and spilling a searing stream down Thor’s throat.

 

The whole time, Thor’s eyes were fixed on Lorne’s face, which was beautiful in its abandon, in the way he gave all of himself over to the pleasure, unselfconscious, wanton and innocent both.  That—Lorne’s face—Thor remembered, not once thinking of his brother as he swallowed Lorne’s seed and held his hips in a firm, guiding grip.

 

When Lorne slid down to lay flat against Thor from toes to nose, the drag of his skin against Thor’s aching cock made him hiss and groan.

 

Then Lorne, sweet smile on his face, slid further still and wrapped his mouth around the head of Thor’s cock, sucking with gusto despite his inexperience.  Thor fought against every instinct demanding that he fuck up into Lorne’s mouth and was rewarded for his patience when Lorne wrapped a hot hand around the rest of him and began to bob with great focus, his tongue a miracle.  When the long, deft fingers of his free hand ghosted down Thor’s cleft, teasing and circling his tight hole, Thor whined and then shouted a too-late warning as he thrust once and came hard and long into Lorne’s mouth.

 

They were a sticky, ridiculous mess, both, despite having swallowed the immediate evidence of their loving, but Thor didn’t care.  Lorne’s weight as he curled in Thor’s lap, the secret of his quiescent cock against the thin skin of his inner knee, his breath on the damp hair of his belly—every sensation was a wonder to Thor, who wished he could be hard again at once so he could slide inside Lorne and open him wide to the wonder of it, make him feel every inch of his love.

 

Since that was beyond even a god at the moment, Thor contented himself with combing his spread fingers through Lorne’s silky hair and feeling him shift minutely against his leg as if trying to make himself ready again.

 

Something stirred inside of him, something so huge and terrifying that it stopped his breath, and he must have clenched his fingers because Lorne murmured at the grip on his hair.  He forced himself to relax, to take a breath, then another, until the fear was no longer sitting on his diaphragm, and then he made himself examine it, seeing almost at once that it was love, immense and powerful, the kind of love that could divert him from his cause, keep him from saving Loki if it meant losing Lorne.

 

Breathing again.  Again.  Promising himself another solution, saying, _You don’t yet know what it is that has happened to your brother.  You are not yet aware of all the variables.  You cannot know that loving Lorne means letting Loki go, no more than you can be sure that bringing Loki home means leaving Lorne behind forever._

 

He wasn’t the brother who rationalized, but for this little, quiet while Thor let himself believe, lying with Lorne, both of them loose and warm and sated, ready to sleep for a time and start again, all the afternoon stretched out ahead of them, all the warm spring evening, the dappled stars rising to cast an eyelet scrim over them, with the frogs screeling their night-song.

 

It was an idyll, and it was destined to end.

 

But not that day.  That day and the next and many more followed in a kind of hazy-edged dream, the spring air warming to summer, birds like living fireworks bursting into life in the garden, butterflies unfurling their damp wings and fanning them.  It was like living inside a watercolor painting, but for the vivid scents and the livewire touches between them.

 

There were mornings when they greeted each other over the makings of breakfast and didn’t sit down to that meal until midday and evenings when Thor had to drag himself away from Lorne’s bed at the last possible moment, courting the worst kind of trouble, because his warm, sweat-slick skin, his smiling lips, the swallowed noises he made, all of it drugged Thor beyond caring about discovery.

 

Almost, he wished Loki would find out.  Almost, he wanted to share his happiness with his brother, as he would have done in another time and place, when Loki wasn’t trapped by vicious circumstance and made vicious by that circumstance.

 

The hours he spent with his brother were fraught with silent accusations, almost worse than the nights that Loki railed against Thor for coming to find him and peddle him false hope when obviously Thor was incapable of offering anything other than tired platitudes and puppy dog eyes. 

 

Sometimes, too, Loki spoke of Lorne like he was an invader who had stolen everything that Loki valued, and always when he said these things, he accused Thor of fucking Lorne, a shot in the dark meant to hurt Thor.

 

Every time Loki said such things, Thor was torn between guilt and rage, for though it was true that he was making love with Lorne almost daily, it was also true that Lorne was not to blame for any of this.  He was as much a victim as Loki, though in a very different way.

 

Then, too, at other times, Loki sat slumped in a seat across the kitchen table from Thor and seemed on the verge of helpless weeping, and he was powerless to offer comfort of any kind.  
  
  


Thor could not seem to find any place of safety with Loki.  Nothing he said or did made a bit of difference, unless it was to set Loki off, make him worse than he had been.

 

Time and again, Loki said, “You should leave.  Leave me here.  Go away,” until it grew into a constant refrain, each repetition piercing Thor’s heart and driving shards of ice into his bowels.

 

One night, after Thor had spent almost the entire day abed with Lorne, Loki asked after a mark he had on the thin skin of his inner thigh.  Thor remembered fastening his teeth there, worrying the skin until Lorne bucked wildly and screamed his release, spilling into Thor’s hand while his tongue soothed the spot he’d just savaged.  It took every iota of Thor’s not inconsiderable strength to hold back a horrified blush, saying instead something about Lorne having ridden Djenna’s horse that morning, a blatant lie.

 

After that conversation, Thor took extra care not to mark Lorne in any way.  That care made him more cautious in other ways, as well.  They’d been moving inevitably toward complete possession of one another.  Lorne had hinted more than once that he wanted Thor inside him.

 

Thor had hesitated, as if there were some final frontier of brother-fucking that he simply would not cross, but he had already resigned himself to whatever special hell this love condemned him to, and he had been considering how to make Lorne’s first experience an especially memorable one.

 

Now, the misgivings returned.  What if Loki came back to himself one night and discovered the unmistakable pain of penetration?  He’d know exactly what Thor had done.  There’d be no way to hide that Thor was making free with Loki’s body for the twenty-three hours a day when it did not belong to Loki himself.

 

Even the most diligent preparation may not prevent some discomfort.

 

But though Lorne would never press, his nature being always to ask, never to demand, Thor couldn’t stop thinking about how much he wanted to slide into Lorne’s yielding body and bring him to completion with his name on Lorne’s lips.  He wanted Lorne in every conceivable way. 

 

He was doomed.

 

When that doom finally befell them, Thor wasn’t thinking about making love with Lorne as he trudged up the road toward the cottage.  He’d spent a fruitless afternoon shouting in the stagnant air of the old forest, trying to get Her to come out and speak with him again, to see if he could tease from Her cryptic taunts even a shred of help for freeing Loki.

 

He’d gone there out of guilt.  The night before, Loki had been worse than Thor had yet seen him, and in the midst of his raving, spittle flying from his lips like a mad dog’s, Loki had said, “You’re not even trying, are you?  Just admit it!”

 

And Thor hadn’t answered, because if he had done, it would have been to say, _No, brother, I have not been trying._

He’d been content the last few weeks, sharing meals with Lorne, working in the garden and the yard by his side, riding into the village on errands, coming home to his warm smile, his willing body. 

 

The hour with Loki had grown into a nuisance, an inconvenient reminder that Thor was failing in his duty as a brother and as a king.  What business had he to linger here, in this place out of time, lovely and changeless, while his people went on without him and his brother suffered in torment?

 

So he’d put off Lorne’s attentions the next morning, guilt eating a hole in his guts, and Lorne’s hidden hurt looked so much like his brother’s slyer fury that he couldn’t swallow another mouthful but had to excuse himself, rushing from the cottage and out beyond the curve in the road, Stormbreaker shaking in his useless fist, his feet raising grave dust as he landed near the woods, his voice breaking again and again over futile shouts while he plunged like a blinded ox among the choking trees.

 

When he returned, defeated, Lorne was working in the garden, as always, and looked up and then away when he heard Thor’s approach.

 

That brief look told Thor that Lorne was hurt and afraid, and it was Thor’s fault.

 

Swallowing the bitter truth of it, trying to force his lips into a rueful smile, Thor came into the garden and touched Lorne’s arm, turning him so that he might see how sorry Thor was for having left the way he did, for having refused his affections without explanation.

 

“I’m sorry, my love,” Thor said, and Lorne made a wounded noise and turned his back.  Reviewing his words, Thor felt a cold finger draw a line down his back.  
  
  


“You are, you know,” he said to the back that showed Lorne’s misery in every line.  “My love.”

 

Lorne shook his head.  “Don’t.  Please.”  His words were barely a whisper, as if they’d been squeezed out of him.

 

“Don’t tell you that I love you?”  The irony of it wrung a sharp sound out of Thor, half laugh, half something darker.  Here he was talking Lorne into believing something that Thor had hidden from himself all this time, telling himself they could make love but not be in love, that he couldn’t love Lorne as a man and Loki as a brother at the same time. 

 

But he could.  Obviously, he could—because he did.  He loved Lorne, and suddenly there was nothing else in this world or any of the others that he wanted more than for Lorne to believe it.  It was madness, selfish madness of the worst kind, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself from closing the space between them, turning Lorne around, and gripping him in both hands, saying, “Look at me, please.  Please,” until Lorne did, seeing there in Thor’s eyes everything he was feeling—desperate love, abiding desire, shame and terror and hope and ten thousand other things he couldn’t name.

 

He wasn’t the brother who used words to explain himself, and now more than ever he didn’t want to talk.  He pulled Lorne toward him, and Lorne came, body pressed to body, face tilting up, lips opening like petals for Thor’s kiss, which was demanding and possessive and a promise he couldn’t keep.

 

With an urgent but gentle haste, Thor stripped Lorne of his robe, laying it on the ground and staying there, on his knees, to help Lorne out of his sandals and his underclothes, laying wet, open-mouthed kisses against his belly, his thighs, the head of his hardening manhood, and then easing him onto his back before standing and stripping away the day’s futility, the dust of the wilderness, the last of his reservations.

 

He knelt between Lorne’s spread knees and looked at him, at the sharp edges of his face, the graceful arcs of his collarbones, the carved lines of his stomach.  His thighs trembled; his lips were parted and wanting, his eyes all pupil.  His cock in the nest of hair jutted proud, long and perfect, against his belly.

 

“Please,” Lorne said, raising his knees and wrapping his legs around Thor’s back, urging him down.

 

“I have nothing,” Thor said, voice rough and low with need, and Lorne offered a shy, wicked smile and fumbled in his robes, producing a stoppered glass bottle, which he handed to Thor, meeting his eyes in challenge.

 

Thor removed the stopper, poured a little out onto his fingers.  It was a light, slippery substance that smelled of sage and lavender, scents Thor would forever associate with Lorne’s garden.  He returned Lorne’s wicked smile with one of his own, private and intimate, and then held his eyes as he smoothed his slick fingers over his cock.

 

Lorne said, “Oh,” and then, “Please,” as those same fingers slid down between his cheeks and found the pucker.  As Thor explored, teasing the opening first, Lorne’s thighs trembled harder, and when the tip of Thor’s finger entered him to the first knuckle, Lorne cried out and dropped his legs so that he could use his heels to thrust up into the sensation.

 

With exquisite slowness, Thor worked Lorne open, watching his face avidly for any sign of discomfort, easing away when pain tightened his lips or showed at the corners of his eyes.  But the slower he went, the more frantic Lorne grew, his cock red and weeping on his belly, his hips thrusting up in ragged rhythm, pleading words spilling from his gasping mouth.

 

Thor had to focus on crop yields and water regulations and the myriad mundane details of rule just to keep from spilling at the clench of Lorne around his fingers, the way he moaned now for it, the way his three fingers moved easily now in the furnace heat.

 

At last, he could take no more, and searching Lorne’s face he saw that he, too, was as ready as he could be.

 

Then, there in the humming garden under the vast blue sky, cradled in the valley, Thor took Lorne, feeling his body yield by slow measure as he pushed inside.

 

“Ah!” Lorne cried as Thor seated himself, balls coming to rest against Lorne’s ass.  Lorne’s eyes were closed against the pleasure, and Thor said, “Look at me, love,” and Lorne looked at him with wonder, mouth opening and closing around a soundless shout.   Thor slid out a few inches and then back in, establishing a rhythm, seeking and then finding what he sought when Lorne cried out and bucked in Thor’s hands.

 

Thor shifted his grip so that he could wrap a hand around Lorne’s cock, and before he’d thrust a fourth time, Lorne screamed and came in a ropy arc that glinted like wet pearls in the afternoon sun.

 

The spasmodic clench around him drove Thor over the edge of his own orgasm, and he forgot his gentleness, pounding ruthlessly once, twice, and then spending in a shout that rumbled thunder from the heavens and draped them both in the play of sun and shadow of a summer cloudburst, which Thor banished with his scattered concentration.

 

His chest heaving with exertion and pleasure, sight still shot through with black comets, Thor eased himself out of Lorne but not away from him, bundling him close, pulling him over him so that Lorne’s wet cock trailed across his thigh and the scent of sex hung thick on the air between them.

 

After a time, Thor recalled himself to himself and looked down at Lorne where he rested his cheek against Thor’s chest.  His eyes were closed, the long lashes painting individual shadows on his cheeks.  He was more beautiful than Thor could comprehend, a crushing beauty, all-encompassing.  Thor wanted him again immediately, wanted to be taken by him, too, and owned.

 

The power of his love terrified him, and he clutched at Lorne, who murmured indecipherably and dropped a sleepy kiss over Thor’s pounding heart.

 

“Did I hurt you?” he thought to ask, ashamed he hadn’t before now.

 

Lorne shook his head, trailing a hand down to Thor’s cock, which he cupped with infinite gentleness, as if it was too precious and vulnerable to expose to the purple twilight that was falling fast around them.

 

“I want you again,” Lorne said, pleased astonishment evident in his tone, and as if answering his need, Thor’s cock stirred a little in his hand.

 

“I think I will want you always,” Thor said, voice thick with love and fear.  Everything was at once perfect and impossible, and he felt the great dam of his heart groaning against the weight of everything it held back.

 

When the coolness of the air sent shivering fingers over their bare skin, they rose, Thor helping Lorne to stand on legs that trembled just a little, and Thor couldn’t help the glow of satisfaction at having done that to him.

 

For his part, Lorne was wearing a dazed expression, staring around his shadowed garden as though he’d never seen it before.  When his eyes finally fell again on Thor, his focus sharpened, and he reached out a hand to trace the great pack of muscles that shifted as Thor bent to pick up their clothes, first across his bent shoulders, then the dip at the small of his back, and finally down over the mounds of his ass, the touch exploratory, more a suggestion than a caress.

 

“I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve you,” Lorne confessed, voice soft.  “But even it’s a mistake, it’s one I’ll never regret.”

 

Thor swallowed the thousand things he wanted to say and instead leaned forward, hands full of bundled clothes, to press a kiss to Lorne’s temple and then say, “Let’s go in.”

 

They picked their way like children across a pebbled strand, Lorne laughing, a quiet, incredulous sound, Thor smiling despite the lingering chill of his fear.

 

Inside the cottage was cloaked in shadow, and when Thor moved to light a lamp, Lorne said, “No, leave them.  Let’s just build up the fire.”

 

So they sat together in front of the fire, the rough woolen bed quilt between them and the cold wood, and talked and sipped mulled wine and shared slow, lazy kisses and long, soulful looks, and when Lorne said, “Come to bed,” Thor couldn’t resist, despite the lateness of the hour, despite every awful thing that could happen if he lingered too long in this dream.

 

Tangled together, sweat and spend across belly, Lorne’s breath still gusting against his damp chest, making him shiver, Thor wanted nothing more than to stay in bed with him forever, pretending that the world outside wouldn’t go on, that Loki wouldn’t rise in the darkest hour, that the people of New Asgard weren’t waiting and wondering, beginning to worry that their king, perhaps, was never returning home.

 

And then Lorne stirred in his arms, a murmured protest at Thor’s sudden tension, and some internal chime warned him that it was almost too late to avoid disaster.  Cursing himself and—unfairly—his brother, too, Thor made an excuse to rise, took the time to clean Lorne tenderly and give him a shift to slide into, and then watched as his lips carried on the smile his eyes shut away when they closed.

 

Soon, his breathing evened into sleep and Thor let go a sigh that shook the heavens before cleaning himself and turning to his solitary mattress, intent upon remembering every expression of pleasure he’d seen on Lorne’s face that night rather than thinking of tomorrow at all.

 

It was a dangerous habit for a king to get into, and he paid for it dearly.

 

Oh, not that night.  That night, Loki awoke in one of his sullen, silent moods, and try as he might to get a rise out of his brother, desperate for his anger as guilt ate a searing hole in his gut, Thor couldn’t budge the cloud that had descended.

  
Thus it was for three more nights.  By day he and Lorne had breakfast and made love, worked in the garden and made love, were visited by Djenna and made love as soon as the hoofbeats faded.  They had dinner, sometimes after lovemaking, sometimes before—once, notably, during—and laid down together in Lorne’s bed, Thor murmuring sweet, foolish things into Lorne’s ear and then rising quietly to go to his own bed before Loki came.

 

The fourth night, Thor was especially tired from a long day of planting the field adjacent to the cattle pen and from the lovemaking that had inevitably followed their cleaning up.  His muscles were liquid with exhaustion, his brain worked to the edge of sleep, and he sank onto his mattress with nary a thought between his knees hitting the ticking and his head coming to rest on the pillow.

 

The first he knew of his trouble was a sharp pain in his calf, which was repeated twice more before he pried his eyes opened and groaned, “What do you want, brother?”  


Then he took in Loki’s expression, and Thor knew something was amiss.

 

“Did you have a good day, Thor?” Loki asked.  Something in his voice approximated Lorne’s sweet tones, and he might have been fooled if he hadn’t also seen the malice simmering in his brother’s green eyes.

 

He rose from his bed to stand naked before his brother—it was warm enough now at night to go without any clothes, and they—Lorne and Thor—had gone far past a need for modesty.

 

Thor stood with his feet shoulder’s width apart, shoulders themselves squared, chin up, eyes not meeting his brother’s but fastened on the middle distance over Loki’s left shoulder.  It was the posture he would assume when he had displeased his father, and Thor took it up now un-ironically, finding in it a kind of strange comfort, wishing for a fleeting moment that it were Odin he was facing, with his eye blazing in righteous fury and his mouth opening to deliver a devastating condemnation.

 

 _Oh, father, if you were here, what would you say to your wayward sons?_   For a suspended, fierce moment, grief burned like a brand, bringing hot tears to his eyes.

 

Then he swallowed them down and tried to look at Loki without actually making eye contact.

 

“Have you come any closer to finding a counter-curse?” Loki asked, his tone like an adder lurking beneath a windfall peach—sweet until the strike.

 

Thor’s heart clenched, and he had to clear it from his throat to answer.  “No, brother.  I have not found anything yet.”

 

“Have you even looked?  Or have you been too busy making free with my body?”

 

Thor, who had battled monstrous aliens and ice giants and world-destroying titans, felt his knees give way.  He had to catch his balance, as if someone had struck him hard behind the ear.  Blood sang in his head, and his dinner threatened to revisit them.

 

He sucked in an inelegant breath, choking on it, and it took him eons to drag himself upright, to resume the position of a soldier awaiting his due punishment.  His body had betrayed the truth; he had no need to speak.  And anyway, what would he say?

 

They waited, six feet apart, the fire settling itself with a flutter like moth’s wings against a window.  Jotun yowled and screeched from the garden dark.

 

But instead of lashing him raw with his tongue, instead of screaming his fury or striking out, Loki stalked forward on bare feet, pulling Lorne’s shift over his head as he closed the few steps between them.  It was only the length from one end of Thor’s mattress to the other, but by the time Loki reached him, Thor’s heart had begun to beat so hard that it echoed in the heavens overhead.

 

Loki paused before him, and still Thor couldn’t meet his gaze.  His long fingers came up to clamp around Thor’s nape, and Thor bowed his head, accepting the death-blow that would follow.

 

Loki yanked, hard, pulling Thor off-balance, and took Thor’s mouth in a searing, possessive kiss that broke only when Loki bit him, teeth fastened to his lower lip hard enough to draw blood.

 

Thor hissed, drawing back, tasting copper, and then Loki was pressing into him, one foot moving behind to hook around his ankle and drop him with breathtaking efficiency onto the mattress at their feet.

 

Loki climbed onto him without hesitation, and his hand on Thor’s cock was too much, hard and rough and painful, and he leaned down for another kiss, which Thor opened for, Loki shoving his tongue into his mouth and tugging him mercilessly to hardness.

 

Thor tried to gather his wits, but they’d abandoned him in the assault on his senses—his stinging lip, Loki’s weight across his thighs, the hand that punished him to aching.  And Loki’s honey and gravel voice saying, “Thor,” and “Brother,” and vivid descriptions of what Loki planned to do to exact his punishment for Thor’s supreme perversion.

 

When it all stopped—the voice, the pulling fingers, the weight—he pried his eyes apart to see Loki reaching behind himself, and when Thor understood what he was seeing, he moaned for what it meant for them, and he reached with a palsied hand to help, but Loki struck him with his free hand and said, “Touch me again at your peril, brother.”

 

And then he was lining up over him, holding Thor’s cock in a painful grip and sinking onto him.  He had his head thrown back, fucking himself with abandon while Thor cursed and tried to remember his own name, and resisted the urge to wrap a hand around Loki’s straining cock—he’d been warned, and even as Loki brought himself to furious pleasure, his green eyes narrowed warningly at Thor.

 

Loki took himself in hand, those clever fingers almost a blur, and Loki hissed and spewed a string of vile curses and then came in burning spurts onto Thor’s belly.

 

Thor hadn’t come, hadn’t been concentrating on his own pleasure, so when Loki resumed rocking, slower now, an arrhythmic tease intent on keeping Thor from spilling over the edge, Thor at last got up the courage to look his brother full in the face.

 

Loki’s eyes were closed tight, lips sealed in a grimace—of concentration or pain, Thor didn’t know.  His chest was red with exertion and the flush of pleasure, his face painted in the same rosy hue.

 

Almost, he looked satisfied.  Almost, he could be Lorne.

  
And then those green eyes opened, a devilish light playing in their depths, and that red ruin of a mouth opened to say, “Oh, brother,” a sustained, sinful moan, and Thor cursed and thrust up into his brother once and came hard enough that he lost time.

 

When he came back to the room, his brother was spilled over his chest, his spend a sticky mess between them, Thor’s cock still inside of him, softening.

 

Loki’s breath left a streak of cold where the sweat dried tacky on his chest, and Thor brought a careful hand up to wrap around his shoulders.  As if his touch had chilled him, Loki began to shudder.  Along the length of their joined bodies, Loki spasmed as if he’d been run through with live current, and Thor held him tight, tighter, muttering nonsense into his ear, until Loki sucked in a huge, gasping breath and pushed himself away from Thor on shaking arms.  His jerky motion caused Thor to slide out of him with a sensation that made Thor moan in loss.  
  
  


Loki made a moue of disgust at the mess pooling between Thor’s legs. 

 

“That’s all you get of me, brother,” Loki said.  “Don’t expect love.  Only one of us will be a fool for you, and I’ll be twice damned if it will be me.”

 

Before Thor could comprehend his brother’s meaning, Loki was returning to Lorne’s bed, stretching out and going boneless in that terrifying way he had when he was slipping away from Thor for another impossibly long span of hours.

 

Thor spent the night making promises to his brother in his head, dreading the moment when Lorne rose from his bed, expecting Thor’s undivided love and finding, instead, a man who had betrayed him in ways Lorne couldn’t even imagine.

 

But what was left of Thor’s sense of duty wouldn’t let him flee into the darkness, so he lay unsleeping, staring up at the suggestion of the ceiling overhead, feeling the places where his body protested his brother’s rough treatment and wishing for blood, if only to wear the marks of his shame for the world to see and know.

 

As it was, Lorne awoke none the wiser, for all the unpleasant fears Thor had entertained about him having “dreamed” the brothers’ encounter the night before.  He gave Thor the usual sweet morning smile, half greeting, half invitation, and Thor didn’t think it was possible to hate himself more, but there it was.

 

“I have to go out, Lorne,” Thor said.  “I may be gone until late.  I’ll take care and be back when I can.”

 

“Where—?” Lorne began, but Thor held up a forestalling hand.

 

“Please, do not ask me.  There is somewhere I must go.”

 

Lorne searched his face, anxiety tightening the skin around his mouth and his eyes, but he nodded and said, “Of course, let me pack you a bag for the journey,” and Thor let him because it made him happy to fuss over Thor and because Thor didn’t want to make him unhappy in this little thing when he’d soon be delivering a terrible sorrow to his door.

 

At the threshold, Lorne said, “Be careful, my love,” and leaned to put a chaste kiss at the corner of Thor’s lying mouth.

 

“I will,” Thor lied, laying his lips against Lorne’s forehead, as if in miming benediction he could discover the right to deliver it.

 

Then he was racing toward the bend in the road, and a familiar grip was in his hand, and he was traveling over the old forest, seeking its dense, rotten heart, knowing somehow that having delivered himself to damnation he would, at last, be wholly welcome there.

 

From above, it looked like a seeping wound, the kind that had killed so many in the days and years after they’d founded New Asgard, when they had had to defend themselves against every evil army the vastness of space (and sometimes time) could manifest. 

 

Dismissing the cries of the wounded, the stench of septic bowels heavy in the metallic air, Thor landed, fully expecting to find himself inside another nightmare.

 

Instead, though the air was close and stale, the path dusty and the trees dessicated husks, like something had sucked all the verdure from them, the heart of wild darkness in the forest was otherwise unremarkable.

 

 _Surely, there should be a throne made of skulls_ , he thought, perhaps a little hysterically.  Part of him was still in shock that he’d been inside of his brother only hours before.  And part of him was mourning the man he’d once been, who would have slain the first man, woman, or child who had insulted his brother or himself by suggesting such a thing.

 

When she came, it was as if some power in her were diminished.

 

 _Or as if I am her equal in evil now_ , he thought, and the truth of it scraped against the back of his teeth.  He wanted to shout a denial, but he couldn’t.  He may be damned to all the hells a cold, unfeeling universe could deliver, but Thor would not be forsworn.  He had lain with his brother, and—he resisted, resisted, but he could not deny—he had taken pleasure from it.

 

She stood in regal silence, still a queen, though uncrowned and shorn of her sickening light.  Even the stench was dampened, as if he’d grown used to the open sewer she carried with her on an unseen wind.

 

Her smile was as vile as ever.  That, at least, had not changed.  He felt better for it, strangely.  Some things—chief among them ineluctable evil—should remain static.

 

He approached her without caution, though his hand on the hammer tightened reflexively.

 

“You have completed your damnation,” she said, almost conversationally, as if this were the first part of a polite formula of small talk exchanged between the fallen.

 

He nodded, stopping two yards away from her, where she stood framed by the vaulted dome of entangled, petrified trees.  Leaves like knife-blades scythed earthward, ringing faintly as they struck the earth, but in a clear circle round about them, nothing fell.

 

She raised a pale hand, fingers like spider’s legs, and snapped her fingers.  Two chairs of arthritic bentwood and a table made of wood stained in blood and reeking of it appeared between them. 

 

She gestured him into the chair on his side, and he sat, suddenly weary to his marrow.

 

Another unnatural gesture and a steaming pot appeared and two cups already full of a bottomless black liquid, reflectionless and unmoving.

Nothing in all the realms would induce him to drink, but she picked up the cup with a tiny lip-curl of what appeared to be actual pleasure, and when she set the cup down, she actually smiled, a smile of the sort a baby-eater gets when having dined particularly well on the squalling remains of a generation’s future.

 

Thor felt his stomach roll and was comforted to discover that his perversion had its limit.  He may have fucked his brother, but he was above drinking the blood of infants.

 

“It’s coffee,” she said, smirking at him.  “Can’t you smell it?”

 

His senses had obviously been deadened by proximity to her fetid glory.  He said as much, and her smirk turned vicious, but she shrugged elaborately, as though such insults were beneath her notice.

 

“Was it good?  Did he scream your name, thunder god?  Did your spending rend the heavens and pour down upon the land in a scalding, salty tide?”

 

Her laughter wrenched a moan from the back of his throat that he bit back ruthlessly, feeling blood in his mouth where his teeth had scored his tongue.

 

As if she could smell the blood, she smiled hungrily and leaned over the table, the dishes vanishing at her motion.

 

“I hope you and he spend eternity rutting and hating.”  Her eyes were rabid with glee.

 

Thor struggled against a wave of revulsion, fought to overcome the roiling guilt turning his bowels to a greasy stew, and said, “Why?”

 

This time, he could not keep back this moan—laughter flowed from her like a river of vomit and despair—but he clenched his teeth against the urge to scream and asked again, “Why?  You’re not the one responsible for putting him here.  You’re just his keeper.”

 

Another shrug, and Thor swore he heard her shoulder joints scrape in their sockets.  “You amuse me, the two of you.  All of your vaunted courage and his wicked cunning, and here you are fucking and crying, trapped forever in constant misery.  It’s gorgeous.”  A black snake’s tongue poked from her mouth to sample Thor’s scent and her laughter sent a wash of bile against the backs of his teeth.

 

But he couldn’t allow himself to be distracted.  There was something she had said, amidst the abhorrence and gloating, something vital.

 

“I don’t hate my brother,” Thor said.

 

“Ah, but he hates you,” she assured him.  “And why shouldn’t he? You’ve used his body and sucked down his spend like a starving beast, without once asking his leave.  You’re no better than the animals, thunder god.”

Thor thought, _Loki doesn’t hate me.  He could never hate me, not truly_ , but he didn’t say it, didn’t want to expose that fragile truth to her cutting tongue.

 

“He’ll hurt you and you’ll hurt him forever, round and round, round and round.  You’ll wear each other down spurt by spurt until you’re nothing, and still you’ll suffer.  Never mind what you’ll do to the other one, so meek and mild—so weak.  You’ll carve through his guts with your lust and leave him hollow.”

 

“That’s what you live on,” he said.  It wasn’t a question; he’d come to a sudden but absolute understanding. “You live on others’ pain; this wilderness is of our own making.”

 

She nodded and started to examine her fingernails, which were caked with black beneath the thick yellow nails.  “Yours, yes,” she said breathily, as if he were missing most of the point.

 

“And everyone else.”

 

“At last, a light breaks.  You really aren’t the smart brother, are you?”

 

But how was that possible?  Didn’t Lorne tell him that Djenna had been born here?  Or had he merely understood it to be so because she had spoken of her father? 

 

Hope stirred like electricity in his belly.

 

Ignoring her, Thor delved his memory for the trips he’d taken into Ooslot.  In all his interrogations, all the times he’d walked through the streets in daylight and at dusk, had he ever heard a baby crying or seen children playing in the town square?  He’d only assumed there must be some because it was a village, and villagers had children.

 

Unless they were cursed.  Or damned.  Unless they were dead like Loki and brought here to live out an eternal cycle of petty misery and backbiting.  Gods, what a horror that must be.

 

Turning his eyes back to her, he saw a gleam of satisfaction crawl into her dark eyes. 

 

“You begin to see now,” she murmured, and almost she looked ordinary—hateful and abominable, but in an everyday way.

 

That might bode poorly for his own fortune, but Thor hoped it only meant that he was no longer truly afraid of her.  Distantly, he felt the lightning straining to fill his eyes and come to his command.  Somewhere far off beyond the stifling trees, thunder growled a sustained note of warning.

 

Her expression shifted, wariness replacing the sick glee, and he felt vindicated.  If this was the sort of place where the damned were the engine of their own destruction, then there was a way—more than one, maybe—to free Loki.

 

Without waiting for her dismissal, Thor rose, happy to discover that his legs were strong beneath him, Stormbreaker just as sure as ever in his grip.

 

“We will come to an understanding, my brother and I, and before we leave this place forever, I’ll be back to see you, witch, and with me I’ll bring my brother, who is more than a match for your parlor tricks.”

 

They were brave, unwise words, but for the first time in a long while, since before a single snap had destroyed and remade everything, Thor felt the rightness of them, and though they might be only a child’s cry against the harbinger wind, he held fast to them, and smiled something approximating her own hideous grin, and left her in a cyclone of dust at the center of the dead heart of her empire.

 

“You’re back,” Lorne said with a grin of happy surprise.  He dropped his spade and met Thor as he came through the gate.  “You are well?” he asked, not hiding his appraisal of Thor’s state.

 

“I’m well, my love,” Thor answered, cupping Lorne’s face in his two strong hands, holding him as he would anything precious and beautiful, and kissed him long and deeply, until Lorne was molded against him, a fine tremor signaling his desire.

 

They made a new kind of love that afternoon, Thor praying over Lorne’s secret places, breathing his life across his skin until Lorne shuddered and moaned, begging, “Please, please,” spreading his legs helplessly, thighs quaking and slick with sweat.

 

Thor took him face to face, hooking Lorne’s ankles over his shoulders and using his free hand to stroke him, so that he carried the motion of his thrusting through the pull of his hand.

 

Lorne was sweating, head thrashing on the pillow, eyes wide and wild on Thor’s face, lips red and wet, open as he tried to catch his breath between his cries.

  
Thor didn’t slacken or speed up his pace, working Lorne into a trembling, wet mess in the ruin of the bed before at last he changed the angle of his hips and broke him open, his cries rising to a shriek as he spilled in a hot wave over Thor’s hand.

 

Thor rode him through the aftershocks, until the spasms shattered his control and he came in a flow of motion and heat that felt like it went on forever, Lorne’s name on his lips like a prayer.

 

He pulled out, helped Lorne into a more comfortable position, and then collapsed beside him, grinning and blowing, tears at the corners of his eyes.

 

“I love you,” he said.  “I love you.”  He said it again to develop the habit.  Lorne slipped his hand into Thor’s, linking them, and they lay there like that a long time, letting their breathing even out and their galloping hearts slow to a walk.

 

Later, they got up and washed each other in warm water heated over the fire, Thor taking special care of Lorne’s cock and balls and hole, Lorne lavishing special attention on Thor’s wrists and the thin place at his ankle and the arch of his feet and the soft spot behind his ears.  He spent a slow minute on the column of Thor’s throat, lingering over the leaping pulse, and laid a kiss there before he stepped away.

 

They dressed and made a simple meal and sat side by side on the garden wall, looking out over the purpling valley, watching the swallows swoop and dive, waiting for the first star to appear over the distant trees and to hear the first owl calling down the night.

 

Then they returned to the cottage and fell asleep together in Lorne’s bed, Thor making the choice to be there when Loki arose.

 

Nothing had been resolved, but he felt that everything had changed.  He didn’t know what his brother would say or do when he appeared, but Thor did know that the witch had a weakness, that she had slipped some truth into her taunting, enough to save Loki.

 

In the darkest hour, when the stars begin to wane and even the owls return to their roosts for fear of the dark, Thor woke to the weight of his brother’s eyes on his face.

 

They glittered green and dangerous in the faint light of the dying fire.

 

Thor answered their look by reaching up to cup Loki’s cheek and brush a thumb across the lashes of his eyes.

 

Loki stilled, eyes closing, lips parting on a stifled noise.

 

Thor stroked again, smoothing over the sharpness of his cheek, and Loki loosed a shaking breath.

 

A third time he touched Loki’s lips, marveling at their softness, and those green eyes opened, his brother looking out at him, and for the first time since he’d found him, Thor saw no bitterness or anger or sorrow or fear.

 

For the span of three heartbeats, Loki let himself be loved.

 

And then the shutters of his heart closed, and the devil rekindled in his eyes, and his mouth opened to say something devastating.

 

And Thor silenced it with a chaste, closed-mouth kiss that lingered, taking first Loki’s poison and then his breath into him.

 

Again, Loki turned to stone beneath Thor’s touch, and again Thor caressed him—eye, cheek, lips.  Another kiss, chaste still.

 

Another caress.

 

At last, Loki breathed out, a sigh not so much of surrender as of acceptance, as if this had been the juncture to which they’d both been travelling and now that it was here, he was ready to let his burdens go.

 

“This means nothing, brother,” Loki said, but his voice was hoarse, as though his throat were tight with tears, and Thor smiled against his neck and nuzzled him until his beard raised a hiss, Loki’s hands coming up to tighten in Thor’s hair.

 

Stop or continue, Thor wondered, waiting, content to let the fate of this moment rest in Loki’s clever hands.

 

Loki pulled Thor’s head away and gave him a searching look.  His usual sardonic smile crept into the corners of his mouth, and Thor’s own grin grew rueful.  He knew it wouldn’t be so easy, but what was easily won wasn’t worth having.

 

“Hungry, brother?” he asked, carefully disentangling himself and going to his own bed to find his breeches.

 

“Yes,” Loki answered, sounding surprised at the discovery.  Thor heard him groan through a stretch and then rise.  A few moments later, he padded over to Thor where he was slicing bread for toast at the table.  He’d already coaxed the fire to greater heat and put the water on for tea.

 

“What have you been doing with me?” Loki said, suggestion like honey thick and sweet in his tone.

 

Thor stopped cutting for fear he’d slice his own fingers off.  He made a production of putting the knife down on the table and then stepped back to lean against the sink.

 

“I’ve been making love with Lorne today,” Thor answered honestly, looking directly into Loki’s eyes, which is why he saw the jealousy that flared there momentarily before Loki got command of himself.

 

“Is that what you call it?”  The question was laden with every lascivious suggestion his brother could call up out of a long and storied history of delightful perversions.

 

Thor shook his head.  “It’s not like that between us.  It’s…”

 

“Dull?  Boring?  Vanilla?”  Loki swayed closer, hips moving lewdly.  “I can take care of that for you.”

 

But Thor crossed his arms, an effective barrier against his brother’s approach, and said, “I’m not interested in fucking you, Loki.”

 

Loki laughed, a short, sharp sound, and said, “Could’ve fooled me,” touching a livid love-mark Thor had left on Lorne’s collarbone.

 

Remembering how it got there, Thor felt once more the desire he always had for Lorne but also the love.  He let that into his eyes as he looked on his brother.

 

Loki took an abrupt step back, as though Thor had struck him a blow, and dropped his eyes, his face closing to Thor. 

 

“Forget dinner,” he said, turning toward the door.  “I’m going out.  Don’t follow me.”

 

Thor let him go with a sharp pang of regret.  He hadn’t wanted to hurt his brother, but he knew if they were to defeat the curse, Loki would have to understand that Thor truly loved Lorne, that it wasn’t about sex so much as connection.  They couldn’t have another night like the one before; if they were to be together that way, Thor and Loki, then it would have to be love.

 

Love, and love alone, would save them all.

 

Thor wrapped the bread in a clean cloth and put it back in the cupboard.  He turned the kettle away from the fire and put away the cups and plates.  He wiped the table carefully, dropping the crumbs onto the exterior windowsill for the mourning doves who perched there and awoke them many mornings.

 

Then he went to bed and fell asleep, trying not to imagine his brother stalking the night with only his eyes and the cold, distant stars to light his way.  He’d be back.  After all, what choice did he have?

 

Thor woke before Lorne, sparing them an awkward moment when Lorne wondered why Thor wasn’t beside him in bed.  He milked the cows, collected eggs, and fed the animals, including Jotun, who was happy to have some bacon rind and fresh milk still warm from the bucket.

 

The cat was grooming milk from his whiskers with one delicate paw when Lorne rose and stretched and joined Thor at the fire, where he was cooking their breakfast.

 

Lorne embraced Thor from behind, wrapping his arms around his waist and resting his head between his shoulder blades.  He was warm and solid, and Thor put his free hand over Lorne’s two, pressing to let him know how much he liked the greeting.

 

They stayed like that for a while, Thor warmed from the front by the fire and from the back by Lorne’s body, a promise and a presence.

 

Then Lorne busied himself with setting the table and toasting bread and pulling a new jar of jam from the cupboard.  He made tea while Thor brought the eggs to the table.  It was domestic and quiet and perfect, and Thor’s heart swelled until he thought he might cry.  He wanted this to last forever.

 

“What are your plans for the day?” Lorne asked Thor, and Thor said, “I thought we could work on plowing another three furrows for the beans you’ve been wanting to try.  And the byre and the coop need cleaning, too.”  
  
  


So they spent the morning and early afternoon on the ordinary chores of a self-sufficient homestead, breaking only for bread and cheese and some shriveled apples, the last of the winter’s store.  When they’d had enough of work, Lorne suggested that they visit the creek that bisected the valley about a mile from the cottage.

 

“There’s a good place for bathing—it’s sheltered water and deep.  It should be warm enough now.”

 

Thor didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t the verdant paradise Lorne led him to, turning away from the road at a sturdy wooden bridge and walking in the direction of the ancient wild.  As they walked, a sound of cascading water grew to a happy rush, and they came around a bend to discover a series of ledges ending in a deep green pool surrounded by a mossy, brighter green bank.  A wide, smooth expanse of exposed rock made a gentle ramp into the water.  Here, they left their clothes.

 

Lorne led the way into the water, leaping with a shout and disappearing into the center of the pool.  Thor followed no less eagerly.

 

The water was cold but not unpleasant, and it filled Thor’s nostrils with a clean, green scent that made him laugh with sheer, simple joy.  It reminded him of a place where he and Loki had spent many a hot summer’s afternoon on Asgard.  Loki had loved to sneak up on Thor there and cannonball into the water, disturbing his peace, or slide into the water like an otter, with nary a ripple, and dive beneath Thor to tug him under by the ankles.

 

Not that Thor had allowed such indignities to go unanswered.

 

Thinking of his brother now, he was struck by how fragile Loki was in Lorne’s form with no magic to prevent the spilling of his blood, blue veins beneath the pale skin accentuated by the coldness of the water.

 

Lorne gave him an uncertain smile, asking without asking, and Thor said, “Come, let us get dry,” to give himself some time to do what he now understood he must.

 

When they were laying out side by side on the warm rock, the heat luxurious after the shock of the water, Thor said, “I have something to tell you, and it will be hard for you to hear, but I love you, and I cannot bear to keep it from you any longer.”

 

Maybe he was being a coward, doing it this way, not looking at Lorne, their eyes closed against the sun overhead.  Or maybe he was giving Lorne the mercy of whatever privacy he could.

  
Halfway through his explanation, when he got the part about Lorne not being Lorne before Loki had been brought to this place, Thor reached out and took Lorne’s hand, and by the strength of Lorne’s grip, he knew how affected the other man was, but he couldn’t help but also be grateful, for he’d feared that Lorne might hate him, never want to see him, never mind touch him, again.

 

When Thor finished speaking, there was a long silence broken only by the noise of water over rock, a noise he could feel faintly through the rock, reverberating up through his spine, making his skin tingle. 

 

He wanted to hold Lorne, but he knew he had to give him time and space. 

 

“Maybe I should go?” he asked tentatively, and Lorne’s only answer was to squeeze his hand harder.

  
Thor settled in for a long and uncomfortable silence.

 

“I won’t give you up without a fight,” was not how Thor had expected that silence to be broken.

 

He opened his eyes and turned his head to see Lorne looking at him, a hardness in his eyes that he’d never seen in Lorne before.  It might have been Loki staring out at him just then, except for the daylight gleaming off his sleek, wet hair.  Loki wasn’t allowed out in the light.

 

“I don’t want to give you up at all,” Thor said.

 

“But you must if you want to get your brother back,” Lorne answered, placing the painful final piece in the circular puzzle Thor had been struggling with for months now.

 

Thor untangled their fingers only so that he could push himself up on his elbows and turn onto his side to look down into Lorne’s face, to see him clearly and straight on.

 

“I think there must be another way.”  He did, but he couldn’t yet explain it to himself, never mind articulating it to Lorne.  He only knew that he had glimpsed a way out woven among the witch’s words.  He was taking the first step towards that nebulous truth by telling Lorne what he knew, though not everything, not quite.

 

“Do you lay with him as you do with me?” Lorne asked.  And there was the thing that Thor had held back.

 

There was no jealousy in Lorne’s question, only a certain emptiness in his tone that struck Thor’s heart like a shard of ice.

 

“Once.  Only once.  And it wasn’t—it’s not like it is with you.”

 

“But you love him.  Like you love a man, that is.  It’s not…strictly brotherly?”

 

Thor shook his head.  “No, it’s not.  But I swear to you, I did not recognize the nature of my love for Loki until after you and I…”  He made a helpless gesture, trailing off, and then tried again.  “I loved you for yourself alone, Lorne, not for the face you wear.  You and Loki are nothing alike.  You are…”  Again, Thor floundered.  He was no poet.  It was his brother who was the master of words.

 

“You are smooth to his sharpness.  You are sweet to his sour.  You are like the red apple after the first frost.  He is the first apple of the season, too green to eat but too shiny to resist.” 

 

Thor shook his head.  “I’m not saying it right.”

 

Lorne leaned up and cupped Thor’s cheek.  “You are saying it true, which can never be wrong.”  He paused then, his eyes distant, thinking.  Thor waited for the hammer blow that would spell his doom.

 

At last, Lorne said, “Will you lay with him again?”

 

Thor thought of Loki in the dark beside him that morning, the way he’d looked when Thor had touched him with gentleness and intent, his momentary vulnerability and infinite fear.

 

He nodded.  “If that’s what he needs…if that’s what it takes to finally…” 

 

“Bring him back?” Lorne finished quietly.  Thor could barely hear him over the rushing water.

 

He nodded again, unable to speak for the lump in his throat.  What could he say?

 

Lorne laid a chaste kiss against Thor’s lips and then made to rise.

 

Thor stopped him with a hand on his arm.  “Where are you going?”

 

“I need time to think.  Will you give me the afternoon?”

 

“Of course, only…May I return to the cottage to bid you farewell, should you decide you do not want me anymore?”  He knew he sounded needy, and he didn’t care.  He was long past believing that pride would bring him anything but pain. 

 

Lorne looked at him for a span of breaths before answering: “I have already said that I intend to fight for you.  It wouldn’t serve my intentions to send you away.”

 

 _But it might keep me from my brother’s bed_ , Thor thought.  He didn’t need to say it; he could see the knowledge of the unspoken in Lorne’s eyes.

 

“I love you,” Lorne said as he slid on his robe and his shoes and turned to climb the gentle bank.

 

“I love you,” Thor echoed to his retreating back, considering what it might mean that twice in twelve hours the man he loved had had to walk away from him.

 

Guilt curled in his belly, and with a groan Thor fell back against the rock, pounding his head against its hard surface and welcoming the dull pain it caused. 

 

Eventually, he got up and got dressed and looked around him.  He wasn’t far from the wilderness, but he didn’t have any reason to visit the witch again, not now.  Then he considered that he hadn’t been to the shore of the Great Sea by day, and he summoned Stormbreaker to take him there.

 

He took care to land behind a lonely stretch of dunes far from any sign of human habitation and moved off with his shoes strung around his neck, padding barefoot in the cool, hard sand near the roaring water’s edge. 

 

The waves rumbled in and out in their lulling rhythm something like his thunder, and Thor felt that rhythm in his core, soothing away the fear and the worry, easing something of the guilt that still gnawed at his insides.

 

At last he came to a group of fishermen casting long lines out into the calmer water past the combers that churned closer to the shore.  He nodded to them as he passed, and they seemed disinclined to speak to him, which was just as well.  He preferred being alone with his thoughts just then.

 

Finally, he moved away from the rising tide up into the soft, hot sand nearer the dunes and sat down to listen to the water and watch the waves crash in.  Once more, the rhythm seemed to loosen his cares, shift the weight of them somehow.

 

Thor was not by nature a deep thinker.  He was smart enough, clever with strategy and capable of bringing his focus to bear on the problems of ruling a kingdom, but he didn’t spend a lot of time analyzing himself or his actions, nor did he usually scrutinize the motives of the people in his life.  He trusted easily, punished fairly when it was necessary, and tried not to spend too much time worrying about things he couldn’t change, like what people loved or hated in their most secret hearts.

 

Now, though, he had no choice but to examine himself and wonder at his loving two men at the same time, one of them his brother. 

 

He’d never been one to put much stock in love.  Oh, he’d loved his Jane well enough, to be sure, and there’d been others, men and women, over the years who’d been welcome in his bed and even in his heart for a time.

 

He wasn’t fickle; he loved whom he loved with all the passionate intensity of his nature.  He’d just never had any luck—or maybe it was time or focus or energy or hope—to make a permanent connection with anyone.

 

Except Loki.

 

Until the moment the light had fled finally from his eyes, Loki had been the one person all his long, long life whom he’d relied on to be who he was, no more and no less, and to know him, Thor, as he truly was.

 

He may not have always liked what Loki had to say, and there had certainly been times when Loki’s nature had expressed itself in distasteful, even horrifying ways. 

But Loki was his brother, blood or not.  And he was Loki’s brother.  And it was as simple and as complicated as that.

 

Until he’d crossed a green field bestarred with purple asters and white daisies and seen his beloved figure in the distance.  Until he’d opened his arms and taken Loki into them, intending to never again let him go.

 

Thor hadn’t recognized it then because he wasn’t ready to see it, but he’d abandoned New Asgard, left behind the people who needed him, the allies who relied upon him—left everything to find Loki and bring him home.

 

Home.

 

To his heart, his hearth, and his bed.

 

But he hadn’t been lying, either, when he’d told Lorne he had loved Lorne for himself, not for what he shared with Loki—that lithe body, the ethereal beauty that Loki had always borne but that Thor had been too blind to notice until it was taken from him, seemingly forever.

 

Lorne was all the things Loki was not, including patient, kind, considerate of others, quiet, calm…  He was the balm to Loki’s viciousness, the antidote to every venomous word he spoke in the darkest hour of the nights.

 

But Loki was swift and cunning, alive in every atom of his being, restless with an energy that made him wild with a passion that met Thor’s own stormiest moods.  Loki could match him stroke for stroke where lightning—and other things, he acknowledged with a private grin—were concerned.

 

How could he lose one to gain the other?

 

Thor shook his head and stood up, frustrated with the trap they were all caught in.  He brushed sand from his backside and returned to the water’s edge, retracing his steps toward the distant dunes where he could disappear without alarming anyone.

 

When he came again to the cottage, it was on fire with sunset light, larks in silhouette painting arabesques in the air overhead.  Jotun was frozen on the wall with one paw up in a delicate gesture—of welcome or revulsion, Thor didn’t know.  The cat had an uncanny habit of watching them, as if he understood the subtle currents of their human hearts better than they did.

 

Lorne was in the kitchen when Thor paused in the open door, but he turned at once, though Thor’s approach had been quiet.

 

His hands were wet; he’d been peeling potatoes.  There was a damp, starchy smear on one cheek, and the ends of his hair, grown long because Thor loved to card his fingers through it, were damp where he’d accidentally dipped it in the pot of water for boiling.

 

In this state, Lorne crossed the small space in three strides and took Thor’s face in his clammy hands and took his mouth in a fiery, possessive kiss that left no doubt what Lorne had decided about keeping Thor around.

 

The potatoes were mushy by the time they at last got around to cooking them, but Thor hardly tasted them for the taste of Lorne’s sweat and skin and mouth, which lingered like a memory on the back of his tongue.  His blood thrummed with satisfaction every time he shifted in his seat, feeling again Lorne’s fullness inside him and the vague discomfort of being entered after so many years without that pleasure.

 

“I will keep you,” Lorne had said as he’d finally seated himself, sucking Thor’s frantic breath into his mouth with every shallow thrust of his hips.  Inexperienced he might be, but Lorne had proven a quick pupil, finding what made Thor’s neck muscles cord, what made him clench his teeth and shout through them, and he’d done it again and again, intent on undoing Thor utterly, until Thor had shuddered and cried out Lorne’s name and come in a scalding wave on his own belly.

 

Only then had Lorne allowed himself to lose control, spilling quick and hot a few moments later, filling Thor with a terrifying rightness and the subtle discomfort that made him half-hard every time he remembered what had caused it.

 

They shared quick, scorching looks over the hurried meal and were once again abed, sweaty and wet in other ways, careful of each other’s sore places even while they made more.  It was in the midst of stroking Lorne with his hand while sucking a blood-rose on his inner thigh that Thor heard, “Brother!” and paused to see that it was Loki looking back at him.

 

He stopped for a heartbeat.  Another.  And then he dropped his eyes back to Loki’s thigh and dragged his broad, rough tongue over the mark, twisting his hand roughly on the upstroke.  Beneath him, Loki bucked once and came, the hot spend dripping from Thor’s hair down his cheek and into the corner of his mouth, which was busy dropping ticklish kisses on the angry mark he’d left to remember him by.

 

When he pulled away, Loki reached out, taking his own seed from Thor’s face and dipping his fingers into his mouth with a wicked look that was clear invitation to sin.

 

With a growl, Thor took him up on the challenge, climbing his body until he straddled his chest, his cock at Loki’s smirking lips.

 

Loki raised an eyebrow, clearly suggesting that he certainly wasn’t going to do any work, and Thor growled again and touched the hinge of his jaw, ran a rough thumb over his mouth and then into it.  Loki let him pry his teeth open, let him slide the head of his cock into his mouth, and then he smiled wide around it and brought his hands up to Thor’s hips, signaling that he should move.

 

Thor did, fucking Loki’s mouth slowly, leaning over him to brace against the wall, making careful thrusts so as not to choke him.  Loki, clearly having none of being treated delicately, grabbed Thor’s hips in a bruising grip and pulled him deeper, harder, until Thor gave in to the delicious heat and suction of Loki’s mouth and set a punishing, increasingly ragged rhythm, pounding into his brother’s mouth and finally finishing in a deep, choking stroke to come down his throat with a shout that echoed into the night as a long, rolling clap of thunder.

 

Loki slapped his ass, and Thor pulled out hastily, throwing himself to one side to keep from crushing his brother, who was clearing his throat and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

 

There was quiet then except for their matching gasps to regain breath.  
  


  
Then, in a wrecked mockery of his usually smooth voice, Loki said, “I owed you that, brother.”

 

“It’s not a contest, Loki,” Thor said, trying to find the breath and coordination to lever himself up so that he could see his brother’s face.  Such athleticism was wholly beyond him, however, so he had to content himself with raising a hand and running the back of it down Loki’s flank, which twitched beneath the touch—ticklish or irritated, or maybe both.

 

“Everything’s a contest, brother,” Loki answered, getting up with enviable grace and moving to the basin, where he took up a cloth and began to wash his face and cock and thighs, taking time over the deep red mark Thor had left.  Then he moved to the sink to take a draught of water from the dipper in the freshwater bucket and spit it into the sink, repeating the action several times before finally downing a whole cup in one long swallow that accentuated the perfect line of his neck and made Thor have to swallow, too, around a sudden desire to suck more love-marks into that pristine canvas.

 

“Are you _always_ fucking?” Loki asked at last, one long finger caressing the love-mark.  His voice was still thrillingly husky.  Thor felt a dangerous and abiding pride at the sound of him.  He wanted to do it again almost at once.  He wanted to fuck his brother until he couldn’t speak at all.  It was a violent desire and one that he saw matched in the dark gleam of Loki’s eyes.

 

“No,” Thor said, at last finding the strength to sit up, pushing back to rest against the wall at the head of the bed.  He didn’t care that he was naked, that he had Loki’s spend drying in his hair and beard, that he had marks across his chest where Lorne had bitten him, rougher than ever before in his possessiveness and thrilling to Thor, who had moaned and thrashed under the attention, thighs spread wantonly, practically begging for Lorne to take him, to make him his completely.

 

Loki prowled the perimeter of the cottage, drawing his fingers down the length of Lorne’s work-counter in the back, tracing the edge of the table in the kitchen, touching the front windowsill but not stopping to look out into the night.

 

When he arrived at Thor’s corner of the room, he sat beside him with his back to Thor and said, “I’m not him, you know.  I never will be.  You will have to choose one or the other of us eventually.”

 

Thor wanted to say, _No, that’s not so_.  He wanted to explain his wild theory to Loki and let his brother play devil’s advocate, taking it apart so that Thor could put it back together stronger and better than it had been.

  
But Loki wasn’t yet ready to believe in Thor, hadn’t yet forgiven him for the last time he’d raised his brother’s hopes.  It was going to take time to open Loki to the possibility of freedom, and Thor was for once grateful that the one thing guaranteed in this place was an eternity of time.

 

He reached a casual hand up to wrap around the nape of his neck, a steady touch, solid and real.  “I love you, brother,” he said simply, not moving his hand until Loki shrugged like a horse trying to shiver away flies, and then he said, “Come to bed,” which Loki did, stretching his lean length out beside him, touching at the ankles, the hips, the balls of the shoulder.

 

They did not tangle their hands together.  There were no further declarations of love.  Thor waited in the breathing dark as Loki slipped away from him, waited as Loki’s being seemed to shift and settle into a wholly different soul.

 

Then he let his eyes close and he told himself to sleep even as Lorne, himself asleep, reached for his hand.

 

The next day and the day after and for many after that, they planted crops, tended the livestock, harvested the first of Lorne’s precious herbs and strung them up for drying.  They took swims in the warm afternoons and dozed together on the smooth rock with the stream laughing in their ears and the birds overhead twittering busily.

 

They had dinner, made love, laid down to sleep with kisses and caresses and woke again the next day.

 

It was a slow healing cycle, a rhythm of life Thor had never lived before.  He found his heartbeat slowing, his smile growing warmer and wider.  More and more, too, he found himself opening to Lorne, letting him in not only to the secret places of his body but also those parts of his memory and heart that were jagged-edged with broken glass and rusted steel and the keening of mothers whose children are dead.

 

And for one hour in the darkest part of night, he ran his hands along every pale inch of his brother’s lovely body and felt him tremble and listened to him curse as Thor brought him closer and closer to an oblivion they both craved but that he would not willingly plunge them into until Loki was ready this time.

 

“No sex,” Thor insisted, tracing the soft, delicate skin between Loki’s heavy balls and his puckered hole while Loki writhed and bucked and swore.  “No penetration of any kind,” he teased, tracing that responsive hole as Loki thrashed his head back and forth across the pillow.

 

God, but he was gorgeous like this, wanton and wanting.

 

When Loki was a shuddering, sweaty mess, Thor would stroke his cock, once, twice, in a firm, demanding grip, and Loki would shriek and come and then close his eyes as Thor touched his eyes, cheeks, lips, and said, “I love you, brother.”

 

Thor had his suspicions about what would save them all, but he wasn’t sharing.  If he were right, there’d be time enough for gloating over Loki’s cynical insistence that Thor was a fool. 

 

If he were wrong, the hope would devastate his brother, who, underneath the sneering and the mask of indifference to Thor’s steadfast declarations of love, was starting to believe, little by little, almost against his will.

  
Thor could see it in the tears that sometimes fell from Loki’s closed eyes after Thor had brought him pleasure, when Thor said, “I love you,” and Loki tried to pretend he didn’t hear.

 

And then one night Loki simply crawled halfway up onto Thor’s chest and rested his head against his collarbone so that Thor could feel the lush fall of his hair against his lips when he turned his head just a little, and Loki spent the hour with his hand over Thor’s heart, one leg tangled between his two, no words, no sound at all but for his steady, even breathing.

 

Thor knew he was awake because sometimes Loki’s pinky finger would brush over his nipple, and he’d have to suppress a moan and a shiver, afraid that any acknowledgement of this most delicate détente would destroy it forever.

 

Loki stayed awake until his eyes shuttered close at the end of the hour, and then it was Lorne’s lax body molded to Thor’s own, and Thor was muffling a sob against his fist and trying not to believe too much in Loki’s change.

 

The next night, Loki awoke, climbed on top of Thor, stretching like a cat from fingertips to toes, wriggling meaningfully against his groin and smiling into a kiss that he initiated.

 

Thor brought his hands up carefully, spanning the trim waist across the small of his back, and Loki arched and made a contented sound and then said, “Let’s go for a walk,” which they did, side by side if not hand in hand, the crickets and katydids accompanying them as they strolled easily together down the road and through the field along the edge of the creek and to the watering hole, the opening between the trees limned in starlight, the cascades catching the moonlight and casting it back like spilled silver.

 

They slipped out of their clothes and into the water, into one another’s arms, Loki laughing, a breathless sound as he wrapped his legs around Thor’s waist and let Thor hold him up while their twined free hands brought them both to gasping pleasure in a span of heartbeats.

 

They were back on the rock, scant minutes left in their precious hour, when Loki said, “I love you,” without mockery, his eyes serious and a little afraid, fastened on Thor’s face, which he feared might split apart for the smile he gave.

 

“I love you, too, Loki,” he answered, and saw that it was Lorne looking back at him.

He was shocked breathless by the transformation.  Never before had it been seamless; always Loki had fallen asleep and Lorne had woken up, or vice versa.

 

This time was different.  Loki had been smiling at him, face opening like a night-blooming flower, all the promise of forever in the look.

 

And then he was Lorne looking at him with a steady, biding look of love and loss.

 

“You brought him to our place?”  It wasn’t quite an accusation.  Always the harder words seemed beyond Lorne.

 

Usually, Thor found that enchanting, restful.  Tonight, for the first time, it irritated him.  Hadn’t Lorne said he would fight for Thor’s love?  If this was the kind of show he put up, then Thor wasn’t too sanguine about his chances.

 

Almost as soon as he thought these things, they were driven away by a wave of shame, which he could feel prickling across his back and as an itching at his hairline.

 

“I’m sorry,” Thor said.  “I didn’t think.”

 

Lorne sat up and gathered his robe around his waist, obviously uncomfortable with his nakedness—or perhaps with the lassitude he must feel in the wake of Loki’s orgasm.

 

Thor swallowed the lump in his throat but stayed where he was, turning his head away to give Lorne the illusion of privacy to pull his thoughts together.

 

And maybe, if he were being honest with himself, which he’d rather not be, Thor was a little afraid to continue the discussion.  What could he say?  He was cheating on his lover with his brother, who happened to share the same body.

 

What was there in all the lore of any realm to give Thor even a starting point for the story he had to tell?

 

At last, dawn began to paint the dimmest grey brushstrokes above the trees around them, and Thor got up, got dressed, and moved onto the path at the top of the bank, waiting patiently but immovably for Lorne, who followed suit moments later.

 

The trip back to the cottage was made in a silence that was, for the first time he could remember, awkward and full of things left unsaid.

 

As they went through their usual morning routine, though, things seemed easier.  Thor tended the livestock while Lorne made breakfast.  They ate together, talking of the day’s work and how big the piglets were getting and whether Lorne should move the garden wall to make more space for growing the medicinal plants he used in his work.

 

But despite it being the hottest afternoon yet, Lorne didn’t suggest that they go to the watering hole, and Thor realized he’d been fooling himself that things were back to normal.

 

Over dinner, he tried to explain himself, but Lorne was obstinately disengaged, and that night, though Thor climbed in beside him, Lorne didn’t turn to mold their bodies together, didn’t offer up his mouth for a kiss.

 

Loki awoke, stretching theatrically, rubbing Thor’s calf with his foot to make sure that he was awake.

 

Then he said, “Tell me about him.”

 

No question of who “he” was.

 

So Thor spoke of Lorne’s kindness, his patience, the way he went about his days and nights, the work he did.  He found himself describing Lorne’s hands as they turned the mortar in the pestle or plucked leaves from a plant so gently that they didn’t lose even an iota of their potency.

 

He spoke of their time in the fields, of the way the village treated him, of Djenna’s friendship and what it meant to Lorne.

 

He knew as he spoke how it must sound to Loki, this little life, the insignificant work, the hundred quotidian details that Thor had first been attracted to and then entranced by.

 

But all Loki said was, “You find it—him—peaceful.  You can rest with him.”

 

Thor was startled by the insight and then ashamed of being startled.  Though Loki had always been selfish, he’d never been unobservant.  After all, every one of his lies was built on what someone else expected to see when they looked at him.  He had to know what they expected from him to give them what they thought they wanted from him.

 

Thor thought he understood his brother for perhaps the first time in their long history.

 

“I can’t be that for you,” Loki said.  There was something bleak in his voice, though not defeated, exactly.

 

“I don’t want that from you,” Thor promised.

 

“But you don’t want to let him go, either.”

 

“No.”

 

He saw Loki nod out of the corner of his eye, and then he rolled onto his side with his back to Thor and shut his eyes and pretended to sleep until it was Lorne lying there awake but pretending, and Thor closed his own eyes and tried not to hope.

 

The pretending went on through breakfast, eaten in silence, and into the morning.  Lorne pointedly turned toward the garden tasks only he could do, so Thor mended the byre fence and mucked the pig sty, strewed fresh straw for the chickens and started on the irrigation ditch they’d discussed to complement the new rows they’d cleared and planted.

 

Midday they ate cheese and bread, drank water, said nothing.

 

By late afternoon, Thor was dirty, his clothing sticking to him, salt crusted over his lip and his neck sticky with it.  He left his tools in the shed, grabbed a towel from the house, and walked past Lorne with a nod in the direction of the road, clearly indicating his intention to go for a swim.

 

Lorne did not follow him.

 

It was peaceful and cool under the trees, and the water with its joyous noise was welcoming.  Thor stripped hastily and jumped in, ducking his head under to clean the sweat from his hair, taking a handful of gravel from the sheltered shallows at the far end of the pool and using it to scrub his arms and torso, his legs and feet.  He wished he’d thought to bring a bar of the lavender soap Lorne made to sell, keeping only the cast-offs, the rough ends and misshapen pieces, for his own use.

 

Then he wished Lorne were here himself, wished he had the words to help him understand.  He couldn’t, though, not if he were right about everything. 

 

When he finally felt clean, Thor crawled up three of the steps of the cascade so that he could stretch out with the water making its way around him, soothing his tired muscles.  He may have fallen into a drowse.  When he finally became aware again of his surroundings, the trees were shrouded in grey and the last of the day’s light was bleeding to indigo.

 

He made his way back along the familiar track, along the road he would miss when he left this place forever, and felt his heart lift at the sight of Lorne’s little cottage, warm orange light spilling from the front window. 

 

It was only the appearance of welcome, however, for inside he found a plate kept warm by the fire, a cloth cover to keep out the ash, and Lorne was busy at his counter in the back, the light over him casting his long, sharp face into deep shadows.

 

Thor ate and cleaned up after himself and did his usual evening chores, and by the time he was done, Lorne had blown out the lamp and gone to bed.

 

Thor slept alone, chilled and sad, waiting for his brother’s eyes to blink open in the darkness.

 

When that catlike gaze came, Thor felt his heart leap again, just as it had when he had seen Lorne’s cottage in the darkness of the valley earlier.

 

He rose to meet Loki and they walked out along the road, which was silver in the moonlight and lit, too, by fireflies in their dazzling semaphoric dance. 

 

They didn’t talk much, only walked, until the stars had shifted minutely overhead and they had to turn around.

 

Lorne was with him at the gate, preceding Thor into the house.  He stopped on the threshold to look at Thor, then held out a hand and took him to bed, where they did not make love but lay side by side, touching at the sharp points, wordless but satisfied to let sleep take them under together.

 

Another moonlight stroll with his brother, another interval of warm morning hours.  Work.  Swimming.  Laying Lorne out on the warm face of the stone, spreading him wide open, using his mouth to make him wet, his tongue driving in and then his fingers and finally his cock, sheathed in all that clenching heat.

  
Lorne fixed his eyes on Thor’s and kept them open, urging him with soft, loving words until Thor was overcome by shaking first and then a wave that rolled him over and down into a hazy half-darkness, only Lorne’s breathless, “oh-oh-oh,” only his gripping hands, his heels digging into Thor’s ass—only the feeling of him shuddering apart beneath him to keep Thor grounded in this world, this time and place.

 

After, they had to swim again, the water almost shocking against their heated skin, and Lorne stayed close, curling their fingers together, on the walk back to the cottage.

 

“Do you talk of me to him?” Lorne asked, and Thor told him all about their conversations.

 

“Do you think of him when you’re inside me?” Lorne asked, and Thor pulled him to a stop with their twined hands, stepped right up close to him until he could feel his own breath breaking across Lorne’s lips.

 

“No.  No, I don’t,” he said, kissing Lorne, deepening the kiss until he felt the tension drain from Lorne. 

 

A simple meal.  Evening chores.  Some quiet time on the garden wall watching the stars rise.  Bed.  Love.  Loki.  Love. 

 

This night, Loki awoke and said, “Let’s go swimming,” so they did, Loki sleek and eel-like, long fingers everywhere beneath the water.  He roused Thor to hardness, dove under to suck him into his mouth, came up sputtering and laughing, slipping out of Thor’s reach as he tried to trap Loki against him.

 

“Didn’t we just leave this place?” Lorne asked, looking up from where Loki had stopped just out of Thor’s reach.  He looked at the star-strewn sky overhead, the lightness of the water in their glow, the silver tumble of the cascade.  “It’s beautiful here.  I didn’t notice before.  Bring me next time and let him wake up here.”

Thor smiled and sidled closer, and Lorne answered with a smile and then made a sudden dive and took Thor’s legs out from under him.  He came up gasping, Lorne’s laughter competing with the water for who could make the happier sound.

 

They climbed out, dried and dressed, took their time going back to the cottage, enjoying the loudness of the night, the insects and owls, the stars themselves almost singing in their intensity.  They found Lorne’s bed by feel, stripped in the dark, climbed in together.  Thor fell asleep with Lorne’s head on his chest, his breath a steady, warm promise against this heart.

 

The next night, when Loki emerged, he took in their surroundings and said, “He let you bring him—me—here?”

 

“He asked me to do it.  He said you’d like to wake up here.”

 

Loki’s face went still.  Thor waited for a new expression to bloom, but Loki stayed like that, locked down, until Thor turned away, letting him have privacy to process the change.

 

Water and sky met in their usual symphony, almost too painful and too familiar to listen to.  Thor wondered if it were possible to die of a surfeit of hope.

  
Then Loki touched his arm, a tentative touch on the thin skin at the bend of his elbow, un-Loki-like, hesitant.

 

Thor turned his face back and saw only twin moons where his brother’s eyes had been, twin moon-tracks silvering his cheeks.

 

Himself hesitant, he reached out to trace one of those trails, wondering if his fingers would come away stained in light.

 

At his gentleness, Loki made a noise and took his face from Thor’s hand.  His shoulders were rounded with grief, his spine bowed.  He shuddered.

 

Thor wanted to brace those shoulders between his hands, wanted to hold Loki up.

 

He didn’t.

 

He watched his brother fall to his knees, watched him curl like an arched bridge over them.  Watched him rest his forehead against the rock.

 

Waited with his breath held until his chest thundered with his frantic heartbeat and even the noise of the stream was drowned out by that drum.

 

At last, long after the time when Loki should have become his other again, the figure on the rock prostrated as if to an ancient god straightened, and like a lunatropic flower bent upward toward the light, toward Thor, who was frozen like the surface of that cold rock.

 

Waited, breath coming in pants.

 

Waited as the figure turned toward him, eyes luminous, blind to expression, turned upward as if he could discover his fate among the stars.

 

“Thor?”

 

And it was Loki’s voice at the moment of his death, bravado and terror strangling him, and the streams had become rivers now, drenching them both because Thor had rushed to pull his brother up, to pull him close, to suck the words from his tongue, to swallow them into himself.

 

Loki shook like the rock below them was breaking apart, broke their kiss to sob in a breath.

 

“It hurts,” he whispered, and Thor hushed him like a child and held him close and said, “I know, brother.  You’re knitting at the broken places,” and he kissed his closed eyes and lapped the salt from his cheeks and gave him the moisture back in a chaste and lingering kiss.

 

Night deepened, the moon setting the stars on fire as it disappeared and then the stars themselves winking out when the blue curtain of morning began to draw away from the trees.  As the first touch of dawn painted Loki’s pale face with blushing pink, Thor said, “How are you, my love?”

 

Loki’s laugh was a hoarse thing.  He shook his head.

 

“ _Who_ am I is the better question.  Did you know this would happen?”  His eyes were younger than they’d ever been when he was a child; he’d come into Thor’s life with a suspicious look and never lost it.  Thor ached to hold him until he grew into his body again, but they couldn’t stay here forever.  They had one more test to pass.

 

“I suspected,” Thor admitted, guiding Loki with a hand, helping him climb the rock.  His legs shook like a newborn foal’s.  Thor kept an arm around him, lent him his strength, though his own insides were quivering like a loosed bowstring.

 

The arrow of fate was away.   Would it land true?

 

“What of Lorne?” Loki asked as they approached the cottage with its one dim lamp gleaming weakly from the window, which was filled with morning light.  Sitting on the garden wall was Jotun, who jumped down and approached them, purring like an engine.

 

“We’ll see,” Thor said, and he meant it.  If his theory was correct, Loki would not be wholly subsumed by Lorne’s emergence, just as Loki was carrying Lorne’s gentleness and love, patience and kindness even now.

 

At Thor’s urging, Loki went to bed, but he didn’t close his eyes, fear lurking at their edges.  Thor smiled at him, putting all of his hope into the look and letting none of his own fear rise to the surface.

Thor climbed in beside his brother, feeling strange going to bed (for the purpose of sleep) in the golden morning light.  He wrapped Loki in his arms and pulled him against his chest, where Loki at last relaxed, loose-limbed, succumbing to exhaustion and sleeping, his breath warming Thor’s throat in little gusts.

 

Thor stayed awake with his brother in his arms and waited, watching the progress of the sun across the cottage floor.  Jotun jumped onto the end of the bed and curled up near Loki’s feet.  Sometime around noon, the man in Thor’s arms stirred and opened his eyes.

 

“Brother?” he breathed, and Thor’s heart lurched in his chest.  The eyes looking back at him were Lorne’s, but the inflection of his voice was Loki’s.

 

“What’s happening to me?” Lorne asked, eyes troubled as Thor had never seen them.  “Am I dying?”  He pushed away from the circle of Thor’s arms and climbed out of bed to stand at the edge, swaying, as if he wasn’t quite used to his body.

 

Thor sat up, putting his feet on the floor but not rising, waiting to see if he were needed.  He didn’t want to interfere—couldn’t if he wanted things to go as he hoped they would.

 

Lorne looked at his hands and then ran them over his own face.  He took two steps toward the kitchen, staggering like a drunken man, and stopped to brace himself on the back of a chair.

 

“There’s something inside me,” he said, clawing at his chest with one curled hand.  Looking over his shoulder, his eyes sought Thor’s, pleading, desperate.

 

Thor said, “It’s alright, my love.  Let it come.  You’re alright.”  He rose but didn’t approach, though he was close enough to rush forward if Lorne needed him.

 

“What’s happening to me?” Lorne asked again, voice like a child’s, high and panicked.  His eyes were wide and white at the corners, his face pale, hands clutched white-knuckled on the chairback.

 

Thor thought he knew, but he could not say, afraid that revealing the curse’s unraveling would somehow reverse it, leaving them all where they’d been before Loki had awoken with Lorne’s soul in his eyes.  It made him cold to stand there, to not go to Lorne’s side and hold him.

 

Lorne’s eyes grew accusing, angry, and a green glint in their depths reminded him of Loki’s talent for vengeance.

 

Thor said, “Please, brother,” and Lorne convulsed, bent double, eyes squeezing tears onto the floor in fat drops, one arm clutched around his middle.

 

“Thor,” Lorne cried, straightening as if he’d been pulled upward from the crown of his skull, face straining against some invisible force, mouth a rictus of pain and terror.

 

“Please, brother,” Thor said again, and with one last spasm, Lorne collapsed to his knees, his forehead striking the chair, setting it clattering against the table with the blow.

 

Thor did go to him then, incapable of leaving him to his agony and his fear.

 

“Shhh,” he murmured, sitting on the floor and pulling Lorne half into his lap.  “Shhh,” he said again, holding him tightly, running a hand again and again over his hair, pressing Lorne’s face into his shoulder, willing Lorne’s body to stop its shuddering.

 

Against his collarbone, Lorne’s breath gusted short and wet, but as Thor whispered sweet, soothing nothings into his ear, Lorne’s breathing calmed, and his hands relaxed their vise-grip on Thor’s flanks and his sobs slowed to hiccups.

 

At last, Lorne sat back and looked up at Thor.  The beloved face was red and damp with tears and snot.  He had worried his lower lip to bleeding, and the pulse at his throat raced like a rabbit’s heart, visible this close.

 

It was Lorne and Lorne alone who looked back at him, and for a breathless moment Thor thought that all was lost, that he’d been wrong in believing that the solution to Loki’s curse and Lorne’s strange half-life was to bring each of them into the heart and life of the other.

 

They shared a body, that was one thing.

 

They shared a soul, that was another.

 

And they both loved Thor.

 

Thor touched Lorne’s face, surprised to see his own hand shaking.

 

“Are you alright, Lorne?” he asked, having to swallow around the pain that welled into his throat.  He loved Lorne; he did.  But Lorne was only one half of the man he loved the most in all the realms.  If Lorne was the only one looking back at him, it meant his efforts had all been for naught.

 

Lorne nodded and gave Thor a weak smile.  Sadness shadowed his eyes and the memory of pain tugged at the corners of his ravaged mouth.

 

When he spoke, his voice was scraped raw, a raspy whisper that sounded nothing like him.

 

“I was going to fight for you,” he said, and Thor’s heart broke.  He tightened his arms around Lorne, but Lorne resisted, and Thor dropped his hands.  Loneliness broke over him like a wave when Lorne crawled out of his lap to sit with his back to the table leg.

 

“I said I would.”

 

“I know,” Thor answered, and his voice, too, was not his own, a tight, thin sound, as if someone were squeezing his heart into his throat. 

 

“But you need me to let go, don’t you?”  Lorne met Thor’s eyes, and his gentleness was there, all the love and patience and kindness he’d shared freely with Thor over their months together.  But, too, there was a new expression, a ruefulness, a sorrow and a knowing that could not be erased.

 

Hope flared hot in Thor’s chest, and pain like an electric shock went through him at the return of rushing blood to his still, cold veins.

 

Carefully, Thor said, “You aren’t letting go, Lorne.  You’re just…letting.”

 

It was the most he could risk saying. 

 

“Letting Loki have you?”  There was no hint of jealousy in Lorne’s voice or in his face.  He was resigned now and maybe a little proud.  He knew the value of the gift he was offering Thor.

 

Thor shook his head.  “No,” he whispered.  He felt tears dampen his cheeks, though he hadn’t known he was crying.  “No, my love,” he said, reaching out a hand.  When Lorne took it without hesitation, Thor had to swallow a sob.

 

“I love you, Lorne.  And I always will.  You aren’t leaving me.  I’m not leaving you.  Please, my love.  Trust me?”

 

It was a cruel request—and impossible, Thor thought.  No one could love him that much.  No one _should_ , least of all Lorne, who’d never done anything to deserve the suffering Thor was visiting upon him.

 

But Lorne was who he was in part because he’d harvested all the best that Loki had kept hidden for his long and bitter life.

 

And Lorne loved Thor without complication or regret.

 

“Kiss me,” he said, opening his arms for Thor to come to him, and Thor did, on hands and knees, rising up to take Lorne’s face between his hands and lay a kiss upon his lids and his cheeks and at last his lips, opening them like a spring flower, tasting Lorne’s smoky sweetness, feeling him shiver under Thor’s touch, feeling him smile into the kiss before easing away.

 

“I’ll see you on the other side,” Lorne said, and then he touched Thor’s cheek, wonder in his face before he closed his eyes and simply…ceased to be Lorne.

 

When the green eyes opened, alive with a hungry and cutting light, Thor let out the breath he’d been holding.  It shuddered audibly and ended with a hitched sob he tried to swallow and choked on instead.

 

He’d wanted his brother back for so long, had dreamed of returning triumphant to New Asgard with Loki at his side, of ruling together down all the long years of their lives.  Of having family again.  Of being loved even for the broken and ugly parts.

 

And Thor had killed Lorne with that dream, Lorne of the gentle smiles and calming touch, of the wisdom of green and growing things and the avid interest in all the world’s creatures.

 

Thor closed his eyes against the pain and guilt, trying to control himself so that he didn’t ruin Loki’s homecoming with his grief.

 

A light brush of fingers over his cheek brought them open, and what he saw on Loki’s face broke the last of his control.

 

“Oh,” he managed, wonder and heart-rending joy overwhelming him, and then he was sobbing in earnest, great, wracking, body-bending sobs that he couldn’t seem to keep in.

  
His brother’s arms went around him, and Lorne’s beloved voice said, “It’s alright, brother.  It’s alright, love.”

 

And for a while he let himself come apart and be held together by the two men he’d loved most in all his long life, one who had known him for the worst that he could be and one who had brought out a best he’d never known he had in him.

 

“How?” he asked at last, looking up and wiping his eyes, startled to find that the sun was moving toward the west, shadows stretching out from the side yard and through the kitchen window onto the floor where they were still sitting.

 

Loki shook his head.  “Shouldn’t _you_ tell _me_?”

 

“Does it—are you well?”  Thor couldn’t have said who he was asking, but first Loki—for clearly it was his brother who rolled his eyes and curled his lip up as an answer—and then Lorne, with a touch to Thor’s wrist and a smile, saying, “Yes, brother, I’m fine.”

 

Thor pulled Loki to him convulsively, until he squirmed and said, “Breathing, brother.  I need to continue doing it.”

 

Thor loosened his hold then but did not let him go.

 

“We should make supper,” Lorne suggested.  “You must be famished.”

 

He nodded, realizing that he was, in fact, hungry enough to eat a horse, something he hadn’t had to do since the first lean years in New Asgard.

 

They rose from the floor and began the familiar kitchen routine.  He watched Lorne with a sharp eye, looking for signs that all was not right.  Lorne moved about his kitchen with the same ease of familiarity he’d always had, and if Loki found it odd to cut bread or slice the last of the bacon for the pan, he made no indication.

 

When someone paused to nip his jaw as Thor laid the table, he knew it was Loki. When a hand drifted across his back as someone passed by to the sink, Thor could tell it was Lorne.  He wasn’t sure where one man ended and the other began, and he didn’t understand how they could both occupy the beloved, beautiful body of his brother, but he had learned a long time ago not to question a gift lest he curse himself to sorrow, and Thor wasn’t asking any questions now.

 

They ate with the easy pleasure of the newly in love.  Loki’s eyes were bright with hope and Lorne’s with promise.  Every gesture seemed magnified, magical, like they were summoning the future by buttering their bread.

 

They left the table with a shared look, the remains of their meal, the mess, forgotten, and Thor stood still and let Loki divest him of his clothes with slow, reverent gestures.  He laid down at Lorne’s gesture and watched his brother reveal himself as if for the first time, with a shy, downward glance he’d never seen on Loki before and that wrung his heart until he made a noise and held his hand up to invite him into bed, his eyes showing everything his throat was too tight to say.

 

But Loki hesitated with his hand in Thor’s, his face serious in another new expression, and Thor was startled to realize he was going to have to relearn everything he thought he’d known about his brother.

 

The excitement of it took his breath away.

 

Loki said, “Brother, I want you,” and Thor swallowed, excited in a different way and a little afraid too.  He nodded, and Loki retrieved the stoppered jar of scented oil from the work counter before returning to Thor’s side.

 

Still Loki stood, staring down at him, his eyes devouring Thor inch by inch until Thor began to harden, the wonder and the power in his brother’s face making him weak with wanting him.

 

His fear increased.  This was another kind of letting go.

 

“Do you trust me, brother?” Loki asked, and there was love and fire and wickedness and so much hope in his tone that Thor shivered and had to clear his throat before he could say, “I do.”

 

Loki nodded to himself and crawled onto the bed from the end, his knee making space between Thor’s legs, urging him to spread his thighs, which were shaking by the time Loki came to a stop crouched over him, suspended like a judge’s sentence until Thor let out a long, audible breath and relaxed, spreading his hands out to either side in the universal sign of surrender.

 

Loki smiled, a brilliant thing, all sharp teeth and patience of the predatory kind.

 

Loki set the jar on the table by the bed and lowered himself with great care until his breath was ghosting across Thor’s lips, but he was not kissing.  With infinite slowness, he teased his heat across Thor’s jaw and throat, across his collarbone and over one peaked nipple, down his centerline to his navel, where he paused long enough for the swift dip of his tongue to startle a gasp out of Thor.

 

He was so close Thor could almost feel his grin against his belly, and he groaned, tempted to guide Loki with a hand in that silky fall of long hair, but with a look, his brother stopped him, and Lorne said, “Patience, love,” and Thor groaned again and pounded his head against the pillow once, twice, before Loki fastened his teeth in the bunched muscle of Thor’s thigh and Thor let out a shout and bucked, Loki’s weight suddenly holding him down.

 

He could feel Loki’s tongue laving over the sore spot and his hair drifting in tickling strands over his cock, and he choked out, “Please, brother, I need—” before Loki licked a searing line between his balls and sucked a kiss below the head of his cock and then spread over him again like a thundercloud and slid his cock into the seam of Thor’s pelvis, making a long, sinuous motion that wrung another groan out of him.

 

For his part, Loki was silent, and if it weren’t for his faster breathing and the hard line of his cock, Thor might have thought he was unaffected.

 

Until Loki paused above him, looking right into his eyes, and Thor saw the love and the wonder there, saw Lorne’s delight in their closeness and Loki’s surprise at Thor’s submission to his every desire, and then, as if released from invisible fetters, Thor wrapped his brother in a tight embrace, pulling him down until they were touching from toes to tongues, which were themselves thrusting muscularly in an obvious foreshadowing of the act to come.

 

Thor growled when Loki pulled against his embrace but let go when Loki whispered, “I want to come inside you, brother,” into his ear on a shuddering exhale.

 

Thor swallowed and said, “Gods,” and “Brother,” and “Loki,” as Loki worked him open with his clever tongue and his adroit fingers, worked him until he was sweating and shaking and begging in broken syllables, saying, “Please, gods, brother, please!” and “Loki, Loki, please, oh fuck, oh gods, please!” and a hundred other things he wouldn’t remember later (though Loki took delight in reminding him at the most inopportune moments).

 

And then at last there was a moment of suspended breath as Loki left off his work to coat his cock in oil, lavender and sage filling Thor’s senses so that he could never again smell them without thinking of the moment that his brother first breeched him, his head sliding past the initial resistance and Thor holding his breath against the intrusion, which felt impossible, though he’d experienced it before with Lorne.

 

Loki waited a moment, saying, “Brother, look at me.  Look at me when I slide my cock into you,” and then Loki pushed in by the slowest degrees, holding Thor’s eyes, making him watch as he seated himself, until his heavy balls settled against Thor’s ass and Thor said, “Brother,” half sobbing, and then Loki moved, pulling out a little and then thrusting true, urging Thor’s legs higher and changing the angle, saying, “I’m fucking you, brother,” and wrenching a scream out of Thor when he struck the right place and set him on fire.

 

Thor shouted again when Loki took him in hand, stroking him fast and hard, chanting his name and a thousand obscene promises over him and driving Thor up the bed until he had to brace his hands against the wall behind him.

 

He was riven open, split in two by the sensation of his brother inside of him, coming apart at his brother’s words, sobbing, tears soaking his hair, his cock leaking and his heart racing so hard he thought it might burst.

 

And then Loki said, “I love you, brother,” and Thor shattered, bucking beneath his beloved, screaming and gasping for breath as he came and came and came, gasping again when Loki scoured his insides with searing spend.

 

Thunder rumbled overhead and was echoed by the blood in his head as Thor tried to regain control of himself.  He felt utterly spent, turned inside out, his brother’s softening cock still inside him making him wince and shiver with the feel of it.  He was crying, his wrecked voice breaking Loki’s name over and over again, and Loki for his part was holding himself up with shaking arms and saying, “I love you, brother,” and “Don’t,” and “Shhhh,” and “I love you” again and again until Thor finally caught a sob before it broke from him and found the strength to reach up and card his fingers through Loki’s hair and pull him down against him, Loki finally slipping out of him, which made them both gasp and shudder.

 

Loki lay against him panting and shaking, and Thor kept one hand spread broad across his lower back as though to anchor him there forever, and the other carded through the sleekness of his hair.

 

Thor said many things then, things he’d never said to anyone, not even to Lorne, who would never have judged him but for whom these words were not meant. Loki exchanged barbed secret for barbed secret, pressing them against Thor’s chest as if to hide them beneath his pounding heart.

 

And then Lorne leaned up to lookwith sad eyes on Thor and said, “Oh, my love,” and Thor kissed him with a slow, sleepy effort, and then they slept like that, sticky and spent, dead weight against the world’s hurts until waking.

 

It was Jotun who brought them back to the world at last, rousing them with a hungry yowl.  They were muzzy-headed, bleary-eyed, uncoordinated as they untangled their limbs and unstuck themselves and managed to get on their feet.  They washed each other with a careful reverence, catching one another’s eyes and fingers, touching the sore places where they’d marked each other in their passion.

 

Then they fed the cat and put on the kettle, and while Lorne worked in the kitchen, Thor went outside to see to the cows and the pigs and the chickens.  Night was almost upon them by the time Thor came back inside to see that Loki was at the table, a simple meal laid out for them."  
  
  


They ate in companionable silence, ravenous and intent upon sating their other physical hunger, and when the meal was finished and the table cleared, they went outside to sit on the garden wall and enjoy the balm of the warm summer air and the symphony of night life all about them.

 

“I could get used to this,” Loki said, sounding surprised.  “I never noticed how beautiful the sky is before.”

 

Thor laced his fingers through his brother’s and squeezed, and they sat that way, with their two hands on Thor’s thigh, and breathed in the sweet garden scents.

 

At last, a breeze brought the scent of rain to them, and the stars donned a scrim of clouds as if to protect their modesty, and Thor and Loki went back inside to strip the bed and put down new sheets and sleep, Lorne draped over Thor’s chest, Thor’s arm around him, legs tangled together.

 

Just before he fell asleep, Loki said, “We have one last task, brother,” and Thor rumbled, “I know, brother,” and then they slept again, content and warm and together, ready for whatever would come next, assured that their love would outlast even hell itself.

 

Hell, as it turned out, wasn’t much of a challenge.

 

They landed at the edge of the Witch’s wilderness and met no resistance in passing under its unnatural shadows and into the pervasive stench of hopelessness that lurked there like noxious gas.

 

Crossing into the shadow of the trees was like leaving behind the last good hope of all happiness and peace, but Thor was used to it, and Loki was frighteningly eager to beard the lion in her own, ugly den, so they didn’t even slow in their confident stride.

 

It took very little time for her to appear, standing in the center of a clearing of deadfall trees, their spiked spokes surrounding her, an abatis of death.

 

A narrow trail, only wide enough for them to approach one at a time, led to her.

 

Thor summoned lightning to blast a wider path and watched her face lose its sneer of superiority.

 

Still, she did not step back, even when the brothers stalked toward her shoulder to shoulder. 

 

“Your power means nothing.  Burn this forest down around me, and I will still reign over all the suffering souls of this world, his included.”  She gestured toward Loki with one spidery finger, its filth-tipped talon scratching at the air.

 

Thor risked taking his eyes from her to watch Loki’s face as his lips took on the familiar, wicked curl, his eyes the savage gleam Thor remembered from those times when his brother had delivered righteous hell to those that deserved it.

 

He didn’t hold back with her.  With a casual gesture, as if summoning a waiter to take his order, Loki disappeared from beside her and reappeared behind her, balanced delicately on the trunk of a tree between two particularly vicious spikes.

 

With a deafening roar, every tree but the one upon which he stood caught fire, flames towering into the sky around them.

 

Thor, protected in a bubble of cool, sweet-smelling air, watched with satisfaction as the Witch at last gave ground, spinning to look at Loki standing over her.  Her hands came up as if to cast a spell, and just as suddenly as she’d moved them they were bound in thorny vines that stabbed her as she struggled against them.

 

Dripping blood into the ashes already falling around her, she said, “Please, I am but a functionary here.  I serve a greater master.”  She transformed into an old woman, bent and warty, with long, straggling gray hair and a pronounced hump.  “You wouldn’t hurt an old woman, would you?  You see me as I am.”

 

It was foolish, Thor reflected, for the Witch to have chosen to meet Loki on his own field of battle.

  
Without even bothering to gesture, Loki transformed her back to her natural form, save for her long, black hair, which he made into hissing snakes that struck at her bare wrists and stippled her dress with twin red marks and fastened on the fragile apple at her throat.

 

She shrieked, recalled herself, and with a deep inward breath, she became once again the Witch as Thor had first seen her.

 

“Parlor tricks?” But the ridicule in her voice was ruined by the way it shook ever so slightly.

 

“Pardon me,” Loki said, leaping lightly to the ground before her as the tree he’d been standing on joined the others in conflagration.

 

A bead of sweat appeared at her temple and began its slow way down her cheek, but if she noticed it, she did not wipe it away.

 

The fire was spreading now in an eerily organized fashion, concentric rings of it reaching out, the scaly trees catching with a noise like strangled screams.

 

Loki showed no sign of effort as he expanded the scope of his destruction and sidled closer to her, stopping an arm’s length away, wearing all the while the smile of a sagacious reptile before it closes its teeth around the helpless prey.

 

“You cannot kill me,” she said, but her voice was shaking, and she looked less sure of herself than she had before Loki had set the forest ablaze.

 

Loki shook his head and tsked, as if she were a child who had been caught up after bedtime.  “I’m not going to kill you.  This—” 

 

He gestured casually around them and they were suddenly back in the clearing with a cage of deadfall trees all around them, the Witch herself unharmed, the blood on her dress and at wrists and throat vanished.

 

“—is a distraction.”

 

“What do you think, brother?  Time enough?” Loki asked, and Thor grinned, thrilled to see his brother back in form.

 

“Certainly, brother,” Thor answered, holding his hand out for Loki to take it.

 

With a quite deliberate switch of his ass, Loki turned his back on the Witch, dismissing her entirely as a threat, and they walked away from her heart of darkness and out into the clean, green world, where even then Djenna was spreading word from house to house in the village that there was a way to be free of the curse.

 

It had taken them some time that morning to convince her that she was living in an altered state, that she and her father had been trapped there for who knows how long.  But once she’d believed them—and something in her eyes had suggested she had already been suspicious of the nature of her constrained life in the village—she’d agreed to carry the cure for the curse back to her people and help free them from it. 

 

“It won’t be easy.  Many of them are happy in their stifled little lives,” she had said.  “But I’ll do it if it takes me a lifetime.”  Her knowing, sad smile suggested that she understood the irony in her words.

 

Soon, the Witch would starve for lack of suffering to feed her awful appetites, a far longer denouement than merely killing her would have provided and a fitting conclusion to quench Loki’s thirst for vengeance.

 

By mutual but unspoken agreement, they made their way back to the cottage for one last look around.  Lorne stood by his kitchen table looking toward the back where his workbench stood.  He walked the inside perimeter, touching the quilt on his bed, the rocking chair, the front window, the kitchen pump.

 

They’d already arranged for Djenna to see that the animals got good homes.  All, that is, but Jotun, who was sitting on the threshold washing his face and waiting, quite obviously, for them to take their leave at last.

 

He was coming with them, of course.

 

Lorne had chosen to take nothing with him.  “It’s not my life,” he’d explained.  “And we’re going to a new world for both of us, so it wouldn’t seem right to bring a reminder.”  
  
  


Now, Lorne lingered in his garden, listening to a thrush trilling in the apple tree, which was growing busy with round green balls of young fruit.  A hummingbird darted among the lavender, and the bees hummed loudly in their busy work among the blossoms.

 

“This I will miss,” Lorne admitted, leaning against Thor as he put his arm around him.

 

“I will, too, love,” Thor answered, feeling in his bones the first stirring of fear and regret—fear that their life in New Asgard would never grant them any peace; regret that Lorne might forget the things he most loved when he had nothing but the cold comfort of a new colony to keep him occupied.

 

“We’ll make a new garden,” Lorne said then, as though reading the direction of Thor’s thoughts from his expression.

 

“We will,” Thor answered, meaning it as a promise.

 

“Then let us go,” Loki said, and without another glance at the garden or the cottage or the quiet, lovely valley where he’d been prisoner for so many, many nights, they left that place and traveled beyond the mountains to where Valkyrie waited in her ship to carry them home.

 

She left them, at Thor’s request, a mile from the main village of New Asgard, disappearing with a waggle of her ship’s wings into the searing flash of sun on her hull and the longer comet tail of breaching the atmosphere.

 

They stood for a moment to catch their breath, Thor letting Loki acclimate to the difference in the air, the strange flora and buzzing insects that Thor had come to take for granted.  Jotun jumped from Loki’s arms to stalk toward the edge of the road, his tail twitching ominously, intent upon murder as his first act of adoption.

 

“It’s…” Loki began, but when Thor turned to look at him, he could only shake his head, his clever tongue apparently overcome by the reality of his circumstance.

 

“Come, brother.  There are things I’d like you to see.”

 

So he led his brother up the road a ways and around a broad bend, down into a hollow shaded by enormous trees with vast, spreading branches that arched over the road, and then up again onto a straight, level road that ran between black fields showing the first brilliant green fuzz of new growth.

 

“We’re still in early spring here,” he said, nodding to the fields to either side.  “This is the first of the wheat.”

 

Further on, the sweeping fields broke into smaller plots neatly delineated with stone walls.  These were occupied by busy people bent over their labors.  In one field nearby three children laughed and threw clods of damp earth at one another while their mother scolded, breaking off her litany of empty threats when she saw them passing by on the road.  
  


Her silence traveled with them, keeping pace.  As the people of New Asgard saw who walked the road, they fell silent, and as Thor and Loki walked, whispering broke out in their wake, as though the grain crops were already mature and soughing in a scything wind.

 

They could see the city proper now, its modest wall and the taller buildings at its center that comprised New Asgard’s capitol complex.

 

“It’s nothing like Asgard,” Thor apologized, his voice tight with memories of a shining golden city and a prosperous, happy populace who had not known that death could come so swiftly and with such extreme disregard for their history or their hopes for the future.

 

“It’s beautiful, brother,” Loki answered, his own voice a little high.  Then, “I could have a garden here.”  And, indeed, the plot of land was fallow, awaiting a new owner, some ill having befallen its last.

 

They were only steps from the western gate now, and Thor stopped Loki with a touch on his arm.

 

“I would have the people know you for who you are to me.”

 

Loki smiled, a wide and wonderful look, glee and pride and a hundred other hopes taking up residence in his eyes.  Lorne was there, too, as surely looking upon their new world as Loki did.

 

“I would like that, brother,” Loki said, and as the gates opened, they linked hands, exchanged a formal kiss of plighting, lovers signifying their promise to each other, men returning from a perilous journey, princes at long last home.


End file.
